High-Pitch Formant Estimation by Exploiting Temporal Change of Pitch

—This paper considers the problem of obtaining an accurate spectral representation of speech formant structure when the voicing source exhibits a high fundamental frequency. Our work is inspired by auditory perception and physiological studies implicating the use of pitch dynamics in speech by humans. We develop and assess signal processing schemes aimed at exploiting temporal change of pitch to address the high-pitch formant frequency estimation problem. Specifically, we propose a 2-D analysis framework using 2-D transformations of the time–frequency space. In one approach, we project changing spectral harmonics over time to a 1-D function of frequency. In a second approach, we draw upon previous work of Quatieri and Ezzat et al. [1], [2], with similarities to the auditory modeling efforts of Chi et al. [3], where localized 2-D Fourier transforms of the time–frequency space provide improved source-filter separation when pitch is changing. Our methods show quantitative improvem...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TASLP
• Authors: Tianyu T. Wang, Thomas F. Quatieri
• Keywords: Analysis Framework, Formant Structure, Speech Formant Structure, TASLP 2010