Exploiting time and frequency domain measures for precise voice source parameterisation

Abstract

Much of our research has focused on the role of the voice source in the prosody of spoken language, including its linguis- tic and expressive dimensions. However, as automatic methods, both for deriving the voice source and for modelling it tend to lack robustness, we have generally conducted studies on small amounts of speech data. These studies have involved the use of labour intensive methods which require pulse-by-pulse manual fine-tuning. This paper describes a method to model the voice source automatically by taking into account some of the strate- gies involved in the manual fine-tuning approach. The method combines exhaustive search, dynamic programming and opti- misation methods to overcome the known difficulties of stan- dard automatic algorithms. A quantitative evaluation revealed parameter values for the proposed method that were closer to the reference values, than those obtained using a standard time- based method