A New Approach to the Formant Measuring Problem

Abstract

Formants are characteristic frequency components in human speech that are caused by resonances in the vocal tract during speech production. They are of primary concern in acoustic phonetics and speech recognition. Despite this, making accurate measurements of the formants, which we dub “the formant measurement problem” for convenience, is as yet not considered to be fully resolved. One particular shortcoming is the lack of error bars on the formant frequencies’ estimates. As a first step towards remedying this, we propose a new approach for the formant measuring problem in the particular case of steady-state vowels—a case which occurs quite abundantly in natural speech. The approach is to look at the formant measuring problem from the viewpoint of Bayesian spectrum analysis. We develop a pitch-synchronous linear model for steady-state vowels and apply it to the open-mid front unrounded vowel [ɛ] observed in a real speech utterance.