International audience

The paper introduces a new device for analyzing, teaching, and training jaw movements: the MARRYS helmet. We outline the motivation for the development of the helmet, describe its key advantages and features relative to those of the Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) and illustrate by means of selected study portraits the possible uses of the MARRYS helmet in the various fields of the empirical and applied speech sciences.

This paper proposes a robust automatic speech analysis method based on a source-filter model constructed of an Auto-Regressive eXogenous (ARX) model and the Liljencrants-Fant (LF) model. The proposed method estimates glottal source waveform and vocal tract shape parameters using an analysis-by-synthesis approach. Structurally, the first step is to initialize the glottal source parameters using the inverse filter method, and the second step is to simultaneously estimate the glottal source waveform and the vocal tract shape parameters using an analysis-by-synthesis approach with an iterative algorithm. The proposed method was verified on synthetic voices with different glottal noise (signal to noise ratio) from 0 dB to 50 dB and different fundamental frequency ( F_0 ) from 80 Hz to 320 Hz levels. The results show that the proposed method achieved a much higher estimation accuracy than that of the state-of-the-art inverse filtering methods on both different glottal noise and different F_0 levels.

Since glottal source plays an important role for expressing emotions in speech, it is crucial to compare a set of glottal source parameter values to find differences in these expressions of emotions for emotional speech recognition and synthesis. This paper focuses on comparing a set of glottal source parameter values among varieties of emotional vowels /a/ (joy, neutral, anger, and sadness) using an improved ARX-LF model algorithm. The set of glottal source parameters included in the comparison were T_p, T_e, T_a, E_e, and F_0(1/T_0) in the LF model; parameter values were divided into 5 levels according to that of neutral vowel. Results showed that each emotion has its own levels for each set of the glottal source parameter value. These findings could be used for emotional speech recognition and synthesis.

International audience

Invariant properties of vocal organ controls at an abstract level are crucial for better understanding and modeling of the speech production mechanism. Despite the large variability of articulatory movements at the execution level, the Converter/Distributor (C/D) model provides a systematic and comprehensive framework for the prosodic organization of speech production, based on the invariant properties of articulatory movements with the concept of “iceberg” region. The goal of this paper is two-fold: (i) to examine the invariant properties in the C/D model in emotional speech, and (ii) to understand emotion-dependent variation patterns of important parameters in the C/D model framework. Experimental results support the validity of strong linear relationship between the speed and excursion of critical articulatorsat the iceberg points for emotional speech. Also, emotion-dependent variation patterns of the C/D model parameters, (e.g., relatively smaller “shadow” angle and greater syllable magnitude for happiness) are reported. Finally, the emotion-dependent relationships between the abstract-level C/D model parameters and the surface-level parameters of the invariant articulatory behaviors are reported. Index Terms: emotional variation, temporal organization of speech, C/D model, invariant property

International audience

International audience

This study examines some of the aritculatory differences in production of non-linguistic information, including spontaneous emotion vs. imitated emotion, para-linguistic information, in which the phrasing and intonational patterns were the same as in the first set of utterances with nonlinguistic information, and linguistic information in which the same utterances were read. The findings suggest there are differences in articulation between imitated (acted) and spontaneous emotion. Specifically, for this particular emotional speech on the vowel /i/, tongue position was found to be higher and more forward, which suggests that emotional speech may be characterized by stronger lingual gestures.