Variation in spectral slope and interharmonic noise in Cantonese tones

Philip Rose

    Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

    Abstract

    Copyright � 2020 ISCA To provide reference data for studies of voice quality variation in lexical tone, an experiment is described to investigate the nature of intrinsic variation in spectral slope and interharmonic noise for Cantonese citation tones. 23 spectral slope and interharmonic noise measures are extracted with VoiceSauce from the tones on /o/ Rhymes of five male and five female speakers of conservative Cantonese. Significant correlation between F0 and both spectral slope and interharmonic noise is demonstrated. It is shown with probabilistic bivariate discriminant analysis that even tones with no extrinsic voice quality differences can be identified at rates considerably above chance from a combination of their spectral slope and interharmonic noise. Male tones, with a minimal error rate of 5.7%, are identified twice as well as female, with a minimal error rate of 14.5%. Combinations with uncorrected spectral slopes perform better than corrected. The best combinations for both sexes involve slope parameters H2H4 (difference between the 4th and 2nd harmonic amplitudes); and H42K (difference between the 4th harmonic and nearest harmonic to 2 kHz), irrespective of noise parameters. The worst combinations involve CPP (cepstral peak prominence) as a noise parameter.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages1933-1937
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2020
    Event21st Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2020) - Shanghai, China (online)
    Duration: 1 Jan 2020 → …

    Conference

    Conference21st Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2020)
    Period1/01/20 → …

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