Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions with Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA) workshop came into being in 1999 from the particularly felt need of sharing know-how, objectives and results between areas that until then seemed quite distinct such as bioengineering, medicine and singing. MAVEBA deals with all aspects concerning the study of the human voice with applications ranging from the neonate to the adult and elderly. Over the years the initial issues have grown and spread also in other aspects of research such as occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. MAVEBA takes place every two years always in Firenze, Italy

A Sociolinguistic Survey of (t,d) deletion, (t) glottaling, and their intersection in East Anglian English

This thesis examines two well-studied phonological features - (t,d) deletion and (t) glottaling – in East Anglian English by maintaining the structuralist roots of the variationist paradigm (e.g. Wolfram 1993; Patrick 1999). It also investigates, for the first time, the covariation between the two linguistic variables by exploring the intersection of (t) deletion and (t) glottaling in word-final consonant clusters (e.g. different). (t,d) deletion has been largely investigated in US English dialects, yet it has received comparatively little attention in the UK. (t) glottaling has been widely examined as a change in progress in England (including Norwich, Trudgill, 1974, 1988) and Scotland, yet little research on this variable has been carried out in Ipswich (Straw & Patrick, 2007) or Colchester. Data was gathered in three East Anglian speech communities: Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich, where 36 participants, equally distributed, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews, reading passages and word lists. Mixed-effects Rbrul regression analysis was carried out. (t,d) results are in line with previous US studies showing that (t,d) absence is primarily conditioned by linguistic factors and its profile is that of a stable variable. A more fine-grained analysis is suggested for the following phonological environment. For (t) glottaling, this thesis also proposes a closer inspection of the following phonological environment. The preceding phonological context - little explored in previous studies - plays a notable role. While word-final /t/ glottaling has completed its social change and is spreading in phonological space even in environments where it used to be blocked, word-medial /t/ is both phonetically and socially conditioned. The covariation between (t) glottaling and (t) deletion shows that the transition glottaling → deletion, in the lenition scale, is in feeding order and is mostly linguistically driven. In this analysis, women exhibit a higher use of glottal variants, whereas males promote deletion – the last stage of the lenition scale

Individual Differences in Speech Production and Perception

Inter-individual variation in speech is a topic of increasing interest both in human sciences and speech technology. It can yield important insights into biological, cognitive, communicative, and social aspects of language. Written by specialists in psycholinguistics, phonetics, speech development, speech perception and speech technology, this volume presents experimental and modeling studies that provide the reader with a deep understanding of interspeaker variability and its role in speech processing, speech development, and interspeaker interactions. It discusses how theoretical models take into account individual behavior, explains why interspeaker variability enriches speech communication, and summarizes the limitations of the use of speaker information in forensics

Reconstructing the tenor ‘pharyngeal voice’: a historical and practical investigation

One of the defining moments of operatic history occurred in April 1837 when upon returning to Paris from study in Italy, Gilbert Duprez (1806–1896) performed the first ‘do di petto’, or high c′′ ‘from the chest’, in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. However, according to the great pedagogue Manuel Garcia (jr.) (1805–1906) tenors like Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794–1854) and Garcia’s own father, tenor Manuel Garcia (sr.) (1775–1832), had been singing the ‘do di petto’ for some time. A great deal of research has already been done to quantify this great ‘moment’, but I wanted to see if it is possible to define the vocal qualities of the tenor voices other than Duprez’, and to see if perhaps there is a general misunderstanding of their vocal qualities. That investigation led me to the ‘pharyngeal voice’ concept, what the Italians call falsettone. I then wondered if I could not only discover the techniques which allowed them to have such wide ranges, fioritura, pianissimi, superb legato, and what seemed like a ‘do di petto’, but also to reconstruct what amounts to a ‘lost technique’. To accomplish this, I bring my lifelong training as a bel canto tenor and eighteen years of experience as a classical singing teacher to bear in a partially autoethnographic study in which I analyse the most important vocal treatises from Pier Francesco Tosi’s (c. 1653–1732) treatise ‘Opinioni de' cantori antichi e moderni‘ (1723) to ‘Garcia’s Treatise on the Art of Singing’ (1924). I analysed the treatises for concepts of registration, timbre, breathing and resonance tuning. Subsequently, I researched contemporary accounts of several tenors to develop a ‘picture’ of their individual voices and to distinguish voice types, and then analysed multiple extracts from operas to determine range, tessitura, dynamic ability, and melodic contour markers for each singer. Using performance practice methodologies in the teaching studio, I was able combine all these elements to produce a valid and effective historically informed reconstruction of the historical tenor ‘pharyngeal voice’ and pedagogy

The Role of Phonics in Teaching English Pronunciation English as a Foreign Language Students

This thesis proposes the use of a modified phonics program to teach students basic rules that will help them to translate graphemes to phonemes in both words they are familiar with and words they are not. It is a common misconception that English has a highly irregular or irrational orthography. Quite to the contrary, English, as a morphophonenic language, has a highly regular orthography governed by systematic rules and spelling patterns that correspond to phonemes in speech. We argue that a knowledge of these rules give students the necessary tools to move from grapheme to phoneme. This also increases their confidence, develops their metacognitive awareness and produces autonomous learners whose pronunciation and communication will improve because of knowledge of how English works and relates writing to speaking

Spartan Daily, February 5, 1982

Volume 78, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6846/thumbnail.jp

A novel lip geometry approach for audio-visual speech recognition

By identifying lip movements and characterizing their associations with speech sounds, the performance of speech recognition systems can be improved, particularly when operating in noisy environments. Various method have been studied by research group around the world to incorporate lip movements into speech recognition in recent years, however exactly how best to incorporate the additional visual information is still not known. This study aims to extend the knowledge of relationships between visual and speech information specifically using lip geometry information due to its robustness to head rotation and the fewer number of features required to represent movement. A new method has been developed to extract lip geometry information, to perform classification and to integrate visual and speech modalities. This thesis makes several contributions. First, this work presents a new method to extract lip geometry features using the combination of a skin colour filter, a border following algorithm and a convex hull approach. The proposed method was found to improve lip shape extraction performance compared to existing approaches. Lip geometry features including height, width, ratio, area, perimeter and various combinations of these features were evaluated to determine which performs best when representing speech in the visual domain. Second, a novel template matching technique able to adapt dynamic differences in the way words are uttered by speakers has been developed, which determines the best fit of an unseen feature signal to those stored in a database template. Third, following on evaluation of integration strategies, a novel method has been developed based on alternative decision fusion strategy, in which the outcome from the visual and speech modality is chosen by measuring the quality of audio based on kurtosis and skewness analysis and driven by white noise confusion. Finally, the performance of the new methods introduced in this work are evaluated using the CUAVE and LUNA-V data corpora under a range of different signal to noise ratio conditions using the NOISEX-92 dataset