14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Linearity of the Function between the Sound Pressure Level of Speech and the Negative Peak Amplitude of the Differentiated Glottal Flow for Voices of Different Intensities

Paavo Alku (1), Juha Vintturi (2), Erkki Vilkman (2)

(1) Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland
(2) Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland

The negative peak amplitude of the differentiated glottal flow (dpeak) is known to correlate strongly with the sound pressure level (SPL) of speech. Therefore, the function between dpeak and SPL is usually modeled as a single line. In this survey, the relationship between dpeak and SPL is revisited by analyzing glottal flows inverse filtered from speech sounds of largely different intensities. It is shown that in modeling SPL-dpeakgraphs the slope of the line matching soft phonation is larger than the slope of the line for normal and loud speech. This result suggests that vocal intensity is affected not only by the single amplitude domain value of the voice source, dpeak, but also by the shape of the differentiated glottal flow near the instant of the negative peak.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Alku, Paavo / Vintturi, Juha / Vilkman, Erkki (1999): "Linearity of the function between the sound pressure level of speech and the negative peak amplitude of the differentiated glottal flow for voices of different intensities", In ICPhS-14, 977-980.