Acoustics final ch. 6 and 7

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  1. What are fundamental frequency differences due to?
    dimensions of the vocal folds
  2. What are power differences in women's speech due to?
    the amplitude of vibration (determined by the source)
  3. How much more amplitude measure is there for men than women?
    6 dB more
  4. What are open quotient differences?
    time the vocal folds are apart
  5. What are closed quotient differences?
    time vocal folds are together
  6. What is spectral tilt/slope?
    losing amplitude for the harmonics as we go up in frequency (women tend to have more shallow slope than men)
  7. What are the biggest differences between men and women voices?
    fundamental frequencies
  8. Do men or women tend to have larger open quotients?
  9. Are there tracheal resonance differences between men and women?
  10. Do men or women have greater harmonic spacing?
  11. What happens because of greater harmonic spacing?
    • formant frequencies may be more difficult to estimate
    • changing the analysis bandwidth is often helpful
    • do this by changing the number of points in the FFT
  12. Are H1 and H2 amplitudes stronger in men or women?
    • women's are 6 dB stronger
    • women lose 6 dB per octave, men lose 12 dB per octave in slope
  13. What are harmonics?
    integer multiples of the fundamental frequency
  14. What is harmonic spacing?
    harmonics are further spread apart for women
  15. Why do infants have higher fundamental and formant frequencies?
    smaller vocal tracts
  16. What are the intonation pattern categories for infants?
    • rise-fall
    • flat
    • fall
  17. What are phonation types for infant vocalizations?
    • harmonic doubling
    • biphonation
    • vocal tremor
    • noise components
    • nasalization
  18. Why do formant frequencies lower with age?
    the changing length of the vocal tract
  19. When does the most dramatic change in formant frequency occur?
    • at puberty
    • stability from 4 to 24 months
    • lowering from 25 to 36 months
    • the shape as well as the length of the vocal tract changes
  20. What is jitter?
    • period perturbations
    • timing of the vocal folds coming together gets messed up
  21. What is shimmer?
    • amplitude perturbations
    • the distance of the vocal folds traveling apart is not relatively the same
  22. What is a perturbation?
    a small change
  23. Can you hear and perceive jitter or shimmer?
  24. What happens if the harmonics-to-noise ratio is low?
    • more air than voice
    • little amplitude, vocal folds barely coming together
  25. What are the fundamental frequency statistics?
    • mean
    • min
    • max
    • range
    • standard deviation- most important
  26. What are jitter, shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio, spectral tilt, and fundamental statistics measuring?
    just the source (nothing else)
  27. What does a breathy voice spectral tilt mean?
    slope drops off quick
  28. What is hypernasality?
    • velopharyngeal incompetence (can't control the velum)
    • increase in formant bandwidths
    • decrease in overall vowel energy (mucus)
    • introduction on nasal formant
    • rise in F1 and lowering of F2 and F3
    • presence of antiformants
  29. What is nasality?
    air is coming through the nose when it shouldn't be
  30. What is dysarthria?
    • motor speech disorders due to neurological damage
    • speech is very unintelligible
  31. What are characteristics of dysarthria?
    • rate changes
    • articulatory adjustments are neglected
    • diminished acoustic contrasts
    • incomplete stop closures
    • generally, timing and sequencing are interrupted
  32. What can spectrograms obtained across time show?
    • if therapy is succeeding, positive acoustic changes should be seen
    • if therapy is not succeeding, no changes will be observed
    • the spectrogram, however, must be properly interpreted
  33. What does supra mean?
  34. Where are phonemes written?
    • on the segmental line
    • we write above the segmental line about intensity, etc (suprasegmentals)
  35. What is coarticulation?
    • speech sounds are not produced in isolation, but in context (syllable, words and phrases)
    • english is highly anticipatory
    • coarticulators are saving time
  36. How do some individual sounds lose their distinctiveness?
    • nasal sounds can make vowels nasalized
    • rounded sounds can make sounds rounded that aren't normally
  37. What are the two types of coarticulation?
    • anticipatory
    • retentive
  38. What is anticipatory coarticulation?
    • features of a sound appear earlier than the sound
    • forward coarticulation (a sound effects the sound before it)
  39. What is retentive coarticulation?
    • features of a sound carry over to the next one
    • backward coarticulation (a sound effects the sound after it)
    • usually has to do with nasality
  40. What is temporal complexity?
    • phonemes become shorter when syllable length increases (if the word is short, we hold the vowel longer)
    • vowel duration gets shorter with more sounds before and after the vowel (trade-off between time and number of units within a word)
    • speech rate becomes a primary consideration
    • acoustic cues are not tightly bound to traditional phonemes
  41. What is clear speech?
    • speech produced with an effort to be highly intelligble
    • contrast with conversational speech
    • broadcasters and air traffic controllers
    • we use clear speech for people with dysarthria (they need to overshoot to make their speech sound normal)
    • overarticulating can make it easier to be heard
  42. What are characteristics of clear speech?
    • slower (durations longer for phonemes than expected)
    • avoidance of articulatory modifications
    • greater intensity of consonants (appears darker on a spectrogram)
  43. Does clear speech affect an individual's intelligibility?
    yes, but less natural sounding
  44. How can clear speech make a person easier to understand?
    • greater fundamental frequency variability (greater variability in pitch when we articulate more)
    • precise timing (not rushing through the words, more equal timing for each word)
  45. What is prosody?
    • melody of speech
    • not confined to phonemes
    • observed over much larger intervals
    • easier to pick up prosody if you have a larger sample of speech
  46. What three acoustic features make up prosody?
    • fundamental frequency (observed as pitch)
    • intensity (perceived as loudness)
    • duration (perveived as length)
  47. How is intonation included under prosody?
    • patterns of pitch rise and fall plus stress
    • content/meaning of message is changed
    • stress has more intesity and higher duration on a spectrogram
  48. What is phrasal stress (emphasis)?
    • giving prominence to a word or phrase
    • linguistic stress
    • lexical stress
    • syllabic stress
    • contrastive stress (constrasts with previous info)
  49. What are boundary cues?
    • mark the ends of language unites
    • pauses
    • changes in duration
    • adjustments of pitch
    • meter (rhythm)- pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables
  50. Why is prosody not just a decoration?
    • gives us a lot of communication:
    • auditory segmentation
    • affect
    • personal information
    • speech rate (pauses and vowels are shortened proprtionately more, stress patterns may also change)
    • vocal effort (adaptive adjustment to distance, not the same as loudness, neither is the same as intensity)
  51. What is included under suprasegmentals?
    • clear speech
    • prosody
    • phrasal stress/emphasis
    • boundary cues
Card Set:
Acoustics final ch. 6 and 7
2011-12-14 03:47:32

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