Pitch Determination from Bone Conducted Speech

Md. Shahidur Rahman

Abstract:

This paper explores the potential of pitch determination
from bone conducted (BC) speech. Pitch determination from normal air
conducted (AC) speech signal can not attain the expected level of accuracy
for every voice and background conditions. In contrast, since BC speech
is caused by the vibrations that have traveled through the vocal tract wall,
it is robust against ambient conditions. Though an appropriate model of
BC speech is not known, it has regular harmonic structure in the lower
spectral region. Due to this lowpass nature, pitch determination from BC
speech is not usually affected by the dominant first formant. Experiments
conducted on simultaneously recorded AC and BC speech show that BC
speech is more reliable for pitch estimation than AC speech. With little
human work, pitch contour estimated from BC speech can also be used as
pitch reference that can serve as an alternate to the pitch contour extracted
from laryngograph output wh