Using phonetic feature extraction to determine optimal speech regions for maximising the effectiveness of glottal source analysis

Abstract

Parameterisation of the glottal source has become increasingly useful for speech technology. For many applications it may be desirable to restrict the glottal source feature data to only speech regions where it can be reliably extracted. In this paper we exploit the previously proposed set of binary phonetic feature extractors to help determine optimal regions for glottal source analysis. Besides validation of the phonetic feature extractors, we also quantitatively assess their usefulness for improving voice quality classification and find highly significant reductions in error rates in particular when nasals and fricative regions are excluded.