A measure of differences in speech signals by the voice timbre

This research relates to the field of speech technologies, where the key issue is the optimization of speech signal processing under conditions of a prior uncertainty of its fine structure. The problem of automatic (objective) analysis of the speaker’s voice timbre using a speech signal of finite du...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Measurement techniques 2024, Vol.66 (10), p.803-812
Main Author: Savchenko, V. V.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analytical Chemistry
Characterization and Evaluation of Materials
Communications systems
Divergence
Fine structure
IIR filters
Information theory
Measurement Science and Instrumentation
Optimization
Physical Chemistry
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Pitch
Signal processing
Speech
Speech processing
Synchronism
Vocal tract
Voice communication
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Summary:This research relates to the field of speech technologies, where the key issue is the optimization of speech signal processing under conditions of a prior uncertainty of its fine structure. The problem of automatic (objective) analysis of the speaker’s voice timbre using a speech signal of finite duration is considered. It is proposed to use a universal information-theoretic approach to solve it. Based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence, an expression was obtained to describe the asymptotically optimal decision statistic for differentiating speech signals by the voice timbre. The author highlights a serious obstacle during practical implementation of such statistics, namely: synchronization of the sequence of observations with the pitch of speech signals. To overcome the described obstacle, an objective measure of timbre-based differences in speech signals is proposed in terms of the acoustic theory of speech production and its “acoustic tube” type model of the speaker’s vocal tract. The possibilities of practical implementation of a new measure based on an adaptive recursive filter are considered. A full-scale experiment was set up and carried out. The experimental results confirmed two main properties of the proposed measure: high sensitivity to differences in speech signals in terms of voice timbre and invariance with respect to the fundamental pitch frequency. The obtained results can be used when designing and studying digital speech processing systems tuned to the speaker’s voice, for example, digital voice communication systems, biometric and biomedical systems, etc.
ISSN:0543-1972
1573-8906
DOI:10.1007/s11018-024-02294-1