The role of voice source measures on automatic gender classification

Physiological properties of the glottis and the vocal tract change with age and gender. Since these changes are reflected in the speech signal, acoustic measures related to those properties can be helpful for automatic age and gender classification. In this paper, the focus is on automatic gender classification, which is implemented using Support Vector Machines (SVMs), using acoustic measures that are related to the voice source. Acoustic measures of the vocal tract and the voice source were extracted from 3880 utterances spoken by 205 male and 160 female talkers (aged 8 to 39 years old). Formant frequencies and formant bandwidths were used as vocal tract measures, and open quotient and source spectral tilt correlates were used as voice source measures. Results show that the addition of these measures can help to improve automatic gender classification results for most age groups.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICASSP
• Authors: Yen-Liang Shue, Markus Iseli
• Keywords: Acoustic Measures, Gender Classification, ICASSP 2008, Signal Processing, Vocal Tract