Geumann, Anja

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On the effect of changes in fundamental frequency and vocal effort in naive listener`s speaker recognition  Anja Geumann Department of Linguistics, Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany geumann@em.uni-frankfurt.de  One of the phonetic parameters quoted as especially relevant in speaker recognition is mean  fun-damental frequency (f0). As was described by Foulkes and Barron (2000) naive listeners find it ea-sier to recognize speakers whose f0 is noticably higher or lower than the average f0. Additionally, a high standard deviation or high coefficient of variation of f0 can be a good cue in speaker recognition. A well observed fact in forensic phonetics is the effect of vocal effort changes on the height of f0 (see e.g. French 1998, Jessen, Köster, Gfroerer 2005). Based on these observations a speaker reco-gnition task with speech produced at different levels of vocal effort on could expect that naive liste-ners will perform in one of the following ways  Listeners have more difficulties in matching speaker speaking at different levels of vocal effort if differences in mean f0 are high, because this important cue is changed.  Listeners recognize speakers better that have large differences in mean f0 between different levels of vocal effort, because they show high deviations from standard mean f0, interpreted as high standard deviation across vocal effort settings.  An experiment was conducted to test these two contradicting assumptions. Data were taken from the Pool 2010 corpus (see for a detailed description Jessen, Köster, Gfroerer 2005) The material consisted of studio quality, read speech, at two levels of vocal effort (neutral and Lombard setting) The higher vocal effort was induced by presenting 80 dB noise over headpho-nes. In the neutral setting all male speakers had a mean f0 between 100-130 Hz. All of them showed clear differences in vocal effort between the two settings, defined by mean overall intensity. One subgroup was defined by a fairly small change in f0 (<5-20 Hz higher), the other by much higher f0 in the Lombard setting (40-60 Hz higher). Speech samples consisted of a short portion of identical read speech and the listeners were asked to match speakers from the neutral to the Lombard setting. The test design was open, foils were used. All analyses were performed using Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2009). The results will be discus-sed with respect to the relevance of f0 for speaker recognition. References Boersma, Paul and Weenink, David (2009). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (Version 5.1.04) [Computer program]. Retrieved April 4, 2009, from http://www.praat.org/ Jessen, M., O. Köster and S. Gfroerer (2005). Influence of vocal effort on average and variability of fundamental frequen-cy. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, vol. 12, 174-213. Foulkes, P.and A. Barron (2000) Telephone speaker recognition amongst members of a close social net-work.International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, vol. 7, 180-198. French, P. (1998) Mr Akbar's nearest ear versus the Lombard reflex: a case study in forensic phonetics. Forensic Lin-guistics 5(1), 58-68. 

On the effect of changes in fundamental frequency and vocal effort in naive listener's speaker recognition

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On the effect of changes in fundamental frequency and vocal effort in naive listener's speaker recognition

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