INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Improved Acoustic Characterization of Breathy and Whispery Voices

Carlos T. Ishi, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Norihiro Hagita

ATR IRC, Japan

In order to improve the acoustic characterization of breathy and whispery segments, we proposed a normalized breathiness power measure (NBP) by embedding a mid-frequency voicing measure (F1F3syn) in its formulation. A partial inverse filtering preprocessing and a sub-band periodicity-based frequency boundary selection approach were also proposed for improving the performance of the F1F3syn and NBP measures. Improvements from 70 to 83% on detection of breathy/whispery segments are achieved by the proposed NBP measure relative to previous methods, for a false detection rate of 10% in modal and rough segments.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Ishi, Carlos T. / Ishiguro, Hiroshi / Hagita, Norihiro (2011): "Improved acoustic characterization of breathy and whispery voices", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 2965-2968.