Classification of vocal fold vibration as regular or irregular in normal, voiced speech

Irregular phonation serves an important communicative function in human speech and occurs allophonically in American English. This thesis uses cues from both the temporal and frequency domains - such as fundamental frequency, normalized RMS amplitude, smoothed-energy-difference amplitude (a measure of abruptness in energy variations) and shift-difference amplitude (a measures of periodicity) -to classify segments of regular and irregular phonation in normal, continuous speech. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are used to classify the tokens as examples of either regular or irregular phonation. The tokens are extracted from the TIMIT database, and are extracted from 151 different speakers. Both genders are well represented, and the tokens occur in various contexts within the utterance. The train-set uses 114 different speakers, while the test-set uses another 37 speakers. A total of 292 of 320 irregular tokens (recognition rate of 91.25% with a false alarm rate of 4.98%), and 4105 of 4320 regular tokens (recognition rate of 95.02% with a false alarm rate of 8.75%) are correctly identified.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Surana, Kushan Krishna

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Janet Slifka.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37104

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37104