Determination of pitch range based on onset and offset analysis in modulation frequency domain

Abstract

Abstract-Auditory scene in a natural environment contains multiple sources. Auditory scene analysis (ASA) is the process in which the auditory system segregates a scene into streams corresponding to different sources. The determination of range of pitch frequency is necessary for segmentation. We propose a system to determine the range of pitch frequency by analyzing onsets and offsets in modulation frequency domain. In the proposed system, first the modulation spectrum of speech is calculated and then, in each subband onsets and offsets will be detected. Thereafter, the segments are generated by matching corresponding onset and offset front. Finally, by choosing the desired segments, the rage of pitch frequency is determined. Systematic evaluation shows that the range of pitch frequency is estimated with good accuracy.

Estimation of the Underlying F0 Range of a Speaker from the Spectral Features of a Brief Speech Input

“…Likewise, in speech technologies such as automatic speech recognition/understanding and automatic assessment of pronunciation, F0 normalization is very important and hence an automatic estimation of the speaker-specific F0 range is necessary, especially for tone languages where F0 plays more important roles than in non-tone languages [9,10]. However, in most previous studies a calculation of F0 range is accomplished by a direct statistical analysis of F0 variation from a lengthy speech input [10][11][12][13], which apparently does not coincide with the way human listeners estimate F0 range in the condition of a very brief speech input. To mimic the auditory mechanism of human listeners, a recent study of ours [14] proposed a model of estimating F0 range from spectral features.…”