Characterizing Formants Through Straight-Line Approximations Without Explicit Formant Tracking

Authors

  • S Seneff

Abstract

A new method for representing the formants of sonorant speech sounds is described. The method collapses the two-stage process of (1) formant tracking and (2) abstraction of rates and directions of formant movements into a one-step process of directly assigning straight-line segments to the resonance contours in the frequency-time space. The method resembles techniques used in vision research [1], and is also motivated by observations of specialized frequency-modulation detectors in the central auditory system [4]. The computational procedures are straightforward, leading to a description of the formant information for a given vowel by a list of oriented straight-line segments. The line segments are not assigned to particular formants, such as F2 . Instead, the recognition process is hypothesis-driven. For each vowel or diphthong to be recognized, a short description or expected ranges of frequency and orientation in the time-frequency dimensions for the first two formants is given. Feasibility of the method is demonstrated by applying it to the specific task of recognizing the vowels and diphthongs of American English in restricted context, spoken by multiple speakers.

Additional Files

Published

2022-12-03

How to Cite

1.
Seneff S. Characterizing Formants Through Straight-Line Approximations Without Explicit Formant Tracking. Canadian Acoustics [Internet]. 2022 Dec. 3 [cited 2025 Feb. 22];14(3 bis):75-6. Available from: https://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/3549

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 3 bis (1986): Montreal Symposium On Speech Recognition

Section

Proceedings of the Acoustics Week in Canada

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