Mandarin Singing Voice Synthesis Based on Harmonic Plus Noise Model and Singing Expression Analysis

The purpose of this study is to investigate how humans interpret musical scores expressively, and then design machines that sing like humans. We consider six factors that have a strong influence on the expression of human singing. The factors are related to the acoustic, phonetic, and musical features of a real singing signal. Given real singing voices recorded following the MIDI scores and lyrics, our analysis module can extract the expression parameters from the real singing signals semi-automatically. The expression parameters are used to control the singing voice synthesis (SVS) system for Mandarin Chinese, which is based on the harmonic plus noise model (HNM). The results of perceptual experiments show that integrating the expression factors into the SVS system yields a notable improvement in perceptual naturalness, clearness, and expressiveness. By one-to-one mapping of the real singing signal and expression controls to the synthesizer, our SVS system can simulate the interpretation of a real singer with the timbre of a speaker.Comment: 8 pages, technical repor

The Phonetics and Phonology of Nyagrong Minyag, an Endangered Language of Western China.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

Tones in Zhangzhou: Pitch and Beyond

This study draws on various approaches—field linguistics; auditory and acoustic phonetics; and statistics—to explore and explain the nature of Zhangzhou tones, an under-described Southern Min variety. Several original findings emerged from the analyses of the data from 21 speakers. The realisations of Zhangzhou tones are multidimensional. The single parameter of pitch/F0 is not sufficient to characterise tonal contrasts in either monosyllabic or polysyllabic settings in Zhangzhou. Instead, various parameters, including pitch/F0, duration, vowel quality, voice quality, and syllable coda type, interact in a complicated but consistent way to code tonal distinctions. Zhangzhou has eight tones rather than seven tones as proposed in previous studies. This finding resulted from examining the realisations of diverse parameters across three different contexts—isolation, phrase-initial, and phrase-final—, rather than classifying tones in citation and in terms of the preservation of Middle Chinese tonal categories. Tonal contrasts in Zhangzhou can be neutralised across different linguistic contexts. Identifying the number of tonal contrasts based simply on tonal realisations in the citation environment is not sufficient. Instead, examining tonal realisations across different linguistic contexts beyond monosyllables is imperative for understanding the nature of tone. Tone sandhi in Zhangzhou is syntactically relevant. The tone sandhi domain is not phonologically determined but rather is aligned with a syntactic phrase XP. Within a given XP, the realisations of the tones at non-phrase-final positions undergo alternation phonologically and phonetically. Nevertheless, the alterations are sensitive only to the phrase boundaries and are not affected by the internal structure of syntactic phrases. Tone sandhi in Zhangzhou is phonologically inert but phonetically sensitive. The realisations of Zhangzhou tones in disyllabic phrases are not categorically affected by their surrounding tones but are phonetically sensitive to surrounding environments. For instance, the pitch/F0 onsets of phrase-final tones are largely sensitive to pitch/F0 offsets of preceding tones and appear to have diverse variants. The mappings between Zhangzhou citation and disyllabic tones are morphologically conditioned. Phrase-initial tones are largely not related to the citation tones at either the phonological or the phonetic level while phrase-final tones are categorically related to the citation tones but phonetically are not quite the same because of predictable sensitivity to surrounding environments. Each tone in Zhangzhou can be regarded as a single morpheme having two alternating allomorphs (tonemes), one for non-phrase-final variants and one for variants in citation and phrase-final contexts, both of which are listed in the mental lexicon of native Zhangzhou speakers but are phonetically distant on the surface. In summary, the realisations of Zhangzhou tones are multidimensional, involving a variety of segmental and suprasegmental parameters. The interactions of Zhangzhou tones are complicated, involving phonetics, phonology, syntax, and morphology. Neutralisation of Zhangzhou tonal contrasts occurs across different contexts, including citation, phrase-final, and non-phrase-final. Thus, researchers must go beyond pitch to understand tone thoroughly as a phenomenon in Southern Min

Consonant colour and vocalism in the history of Irish

Wydział AnglistykiNiniejsza praca poświęcona jest związanym ze sobą kwestiom barwienia spółgłosek i wokalizmu w historii języka Irlandzkiego, ze szczególną uwagą na okres staro-irlandzki. Głównym twierdzeniem pracy jest to, że język staro-irlandzki miał trzy odrębne serie spółgłosek, polegających na barwieniu, oraz minimalny (wertykalny) system samogłosek składający się z dwóch tylko komponentów. Obrona głównego twierdzenia ma podwójny charakter: empiryczny i typologiczny. Część typologiczna bazuje na kompleksowym przeglądzie minimalnych systemów samogłosek w językach świata. Część empiryczna oparta jest na opisie morfologii czasownika staro-irlandzkiego, w którym występują trzy barwy spółgłoskowe, ale tylko dwie samogłoski.This dissertation deals with the related questions of consonant colour and vocalism in the history of Irish, focusing particularly on the Old Irish period. It argues that Old Irish had three distinct series of consonant colour, and a vertical vowel system of only two members. This position is defended typologically, by means of a comprehensive survey of minimal and vertical vowel systems in the cross-linguistic literature, and also empirically, through a detailed description of Old Irish verbal morphology in terms of a phonological system with three consonant colours and only two vowels

A phonological study on English loanwords in Mandarin Chinese

The general opinion about the way English borrowings enter Mandarin is that English words are preferably integrated into Mandarin via calquing, which includes a special case called Phonetic-Semantic Matching (PSM) (Zuckermann 2004), meaning words being phonetically assimilated and semantically transferred at the same time. The reason for that is that Mandarin is written in Chinese characters, which each has a single-syllable pronunciation and a self-contained meaning, and the meaning achieved by the selection of characters may match the original English words. There are some cases which are agreed by many scholars to be PSM. However, as this study demonstrates, the semantics of the borrowing and the original word do not really match, the relation considered to be “artificial” by Novotná (1967). This study analyses a corpus of 600 established English loanwords in Mandarin to test the hypothesis that semantic matching is not a significant factor in the loanword adaptation process because there is no semantic relation between the borrowed words and the characters used to record them. To measure the phonological similarity between the English input and the Mandarin output, one of the models in adult second language perception, the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1995a), is used as the framework to judge the phonemic matching between the English word and the adapted Mandarin outcome. The meanings of the characters used in recording the loanwords are referred in The Dictionary of Modern Chinese to see whether there are cases of semantic matching. The phonotactic adaptation of illicit sound sequences is also analysed in Optimality Theory (McCarthy 2002) to give an account of phonetic-phonological analysis of the adaptation process. Thus, the percentage of Phono-Semantic Matching is obtained in the corpus. As the corpus investigation shows, the loanwords that can match up both the phonological and the semantic quality of the original words are very few. The most commonly acknowledged phono-semantic matching cases are only phonetic loanwords. In conclusion, this paper argues that the semantic resource of Chinese writing system is not used as a major factor in the integration of loanwords. Borrowing between languages with different writing systems is not much different than borrowing between languages with same writing system or without a writing system. Though Chinese writing system interferes with the borrowing, it is the linguistic factors that determine the borrowing process and results. Chinese characters are, by a large proportion, conventional graphic signs with a phonetic value being the more significant factor in loanword integration process

Nasal codas in Standard Chinese: a study in the framework of the distinctive feature theory

Thesis (Ph.D.)—Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, 2006Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-147)This electronic version was prepared by the student. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.NIH Chyn Duog Shiah Memorial FellowshipPh. D

Effect of voicing and articulation manner on aerosol particle emission during human speech.

Previously, we demonstrated a strong correlation between the amplitude of human speech and the emission rate of micron-scale expiratory aerosol particles, which are believed to play a role in respiratory disease transmission. To further those findings, here we systematically investigate the effect of different 'phones' (the basic sound units of speech) on the emission of particles from the human respiratory tract during speech. We measured the respiratory particle emission rates of 56 healthy human volunteers voicing specific phones, both in isolation and in the context of a standard spoken text. We found that certain phones are associated with significantly higher particle production; for example, the vowel /i/ ("need," "sea") produces more particles than /ɑ/ ("saw," "hot") or /u/ ("blue," "mood"), while disyllabic words including voiced plosive consonants (e.g., /d/, /b/, /g/) yield more particles than words with voiceless fricatives (e.g., /s/, /h/, /f/). These trends for discrete phones and words were corroborated by the time-resolved particle emission rates as volunteers read aloud from a standard text passage that incorporates a broad range of the phones present in spoken English. Our measurements showed that particle emission rates were positively correlated with the vowel content of a phrase; conversely, particle emission decreased during phrases with a high fraction of voiceless fricatives. Our particle emission data is broadly consistent with prior measurements of the egressive airflow rate associated with the vocalization of various phones that differ in voicing and articulation. These results suggest that airborne transmission of respiratory pathogens via speech aerosol particles could be modulated by specific phonetic characteristics of the language spoken by a given human population, along with other, more frequently considered epidemiological variables