14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Perception of Voice Quality as a Mixture of Individual Voice Qualities

Blas Payri

Spoken Language Processing Group, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

In this article we describe an experiment based on the concatenation of voice samples uttered by different speakers. A total of 20 non-mixed and 380 mixed utterances were used. Listeners rated the utterances according to their hearing one speaker or a mixture. A perceptual score resulted for voice substituability. 23% of the mixed sounds were accepted (51% when considering only female-female mixes and 34% for malemale mixtures). Results show that the substituability depends on the perceptual distance between the mixed voices, and are specially related to pitch and gender. A discussion on voice individuality and global timbre as an ensemble of segmental timbres is proposed.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Payri, Blas (1999): "Perception of voice quality as a mixture of individual voice qualities", In ICPhS-14, 2453-2456.