EUROSPEECH '95 Fourth European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Madrid, Spain September 18-21, 1995

Evaluation of a Vowel Normalisation Procedure Based on Speech Production Knowledge

Pascal Perrier, Lian Apostol, Yohan Payan

Institut de la Communication Parlee - URA CNRS 368 - INPG & Université Stendhal, Grenoble, France

In this paper a vowel normalisation procedure, proposed in 1993 by Pay an & Perrier [1], and based on the notion of affiliation between formants and vocal tract cavities, is quantitatively evaluated on five different speakers. For that, we compare its performance to those of 4 normalisation procedures, currently quoted in the literature, and of a modified version of one of them. Our procedure appears to be the best one for the normalisation of formant F2. It is, however, fairly weak for Fl. This failure seems to be explained by the acoustic origin of formant Fl, which is a Helmholtz resonance of the back cavity, and suggests that the size of the constriction should also be taken in consideration in the procedure. Keywords: speaker normalisation; speaker adaptation; vowel production.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Perrier, Pascal / Apostol, Lian / Payan, Yohan (1995): "Evaluation of a vowel normalisation procedure based on speech production knowledge", In EUROSPEECH-1995, 1925-1928.