ACOUSTIC DESCRIPTION OF A SOPRANO'S VOWELS BASED ON PERCEPTUAL LINEAR PREDICTION

Thomas John Millhouse¹ & Frantz Clermont^2
1Sydney Conservatorium, University of Sydney; ²JP French Associates, Forensic Speech and Acoustics Laboratory York

ID 1458
[full paper]

A perceptually-motivated model (Hermansky, 1990) known as Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP) is employed to parameterise and to interpret the cardinal vowels sung by a professional soprano at pitches ranging from 220 to 880 Hz. The PLP model yields perceptual formants (F1’ and F2’), which encode the low and high-spectral regions, respectively. These formants are found to be tractable and robust, thereby facilitating a more complete description of the sung-vowel space.