Abstract-The personal quality of sustained vowels uttered by eight male talkers was represented multidimensionally in a psychological auditory space (PAS) by means of Kruskal's multidimensional scaling procedure based on the perceptual confusion in talker discrimination tests. Physical properties of the vowels were analyzed in terms of elementary acoustical parameters, such as formant frequencies, slope of glottal source spectrum, mean fundamental pitch frequency, and rapid fluctuation of fundamental pitch period. Then the relationship between the configuration on the PAS and the acoustical parameters was examined through multiple correlation and regression analysis.The contribution of those acoustical parameters to the personal quality of the five Japanese vowels and the relative contributions of the vocal tract and the glottal source characteristics are demonstrated quantitatively.These results were obtained partially. by utilizing hybrid voices in which the source wave or the formant frequency pattern was interchanged among different talkers.

No abstract

Monosyllabic, bisyllabic, and trisyllabic words of various phonemic constitutions were spoken with the four tones of standard colloqual Chinese by three speakers, two male and a female, born in Formosa, and the typical pitch patterns of the four tones for each speaker were extracted from these speech samples. Effects of the position of the syllable and the context of the kind of tone in a word on the average pitch frequency, range of change in pitch frequency, and duration of the typical pitch patterns were also analyzed. Then, the listening test was conducted to identify the kind of tone of the speech samples, and perceptual cues of the four tones were investigated through the confusion among tones, which was characteristic of each of native and nonnative listeners groups and each of nonsense and meaningful words groups. Based on the results of the acoustical analysis and the listening test, a set of essential features of the four tones were derived, and a generative model of pitch pattern of the tone accent was proposed. The results were examined utilizing listening test with the synthetic speech generated by the model. Effect of intensity pattern on the tone accent was also discussed.

No abstract

No abstract