Age, sex, and vowel dependencies of acoustic measures related to the voice source^a)

The effects of age, sex, and vocal tract configuration on the glottal excitation signal in speech are only partially understood, yet understanding these effects is important for both recognition and synthesis of speech as well as for medical purposes. In this paper, three acoustic measures related to the voice source are analyzed for five vowels from 3145 CVC utterances spoken by 335 talkers (⁠$8–39years$ old) from the CID database [Miller et al., Proceedings of ICASSP, 1996, Vol. 2, pp. 849–852]. The measures are: the fundamental frequency $(F0)$⁠, the difference between the “corrected” (denoted by an asterisk) first two spectral harmonic magnitudes, $H1*−H2*$ (related to the open quotient), and the difference between the “corrected” magnitudes of the first spectral harmonic and that of the third formant peak, $H1*−A3*$ (related to source spectral tilt). The correction refers to compensating for the influence of formant frequencies on spectral magnitude estimation. Experimental results show that the three acoustic measures are dependent to varying degrees on age and vowel. Age dependencies are more prominent for male talkers, while vowel dependencies are more prominent for female talkers suggesting a greater vocal tract-source interaction. All talkers show a dependency of $F0$ on sex and on $F3$⁠, and of $H1*−A3*$ on vowel type. For low-pitched talkers $(F0⩽175Hz)$⁠, $H1*−H2*$ is positively correlated with $F0$ while for high-pitched talkers, $H1*−H2*$ is dependent on $F1$ or vowel height. For high-pitched talkers there were no significant sex dependencies of $H1*−H2*$ and $H1*−A3*$⁠. The statistical significance of these results is shown.