<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>Voicing is an important phonetic characteristic of speech. Each phoneme belongs to a group of either voiced or unvoiced sounds. We investigated and compared the performance of five algorithms widely used to estimate speech voicing. All algorithms were implemented in Matlab and tested on both short consonants and continuous speech. Phonetically paired consonants (voiced <italic>vs</italic> unvoiced) and parts of read speech from audio books were used in the experiments. The tuned harmonics-to-noise ratio method gave the best results in both situations, <italic>ie</italic> for consonants and continuous speech. Using this method, the overall voicing of Czech, Polish, Hungarian and English was investigated. Hungarian speech showed the highest proportion of voiced parts, approx. 75 %. In other languages, the proportion of voiced parts was around 70 %.</p>
</abstract>

Voicing is an important phonetic characteristic of speech. Each phoneme belongs to a group of either voiced or unvoiced sounds. We investigated and compared the performance of five algorithms widely used to estimate speech voicing. All algorithms were implemented in Matlab and tested on both short consonants and continuous speech. Phonetically paired consonants (voiced vs unvoiced) and parts of read speech from audio books were used in the experiments. The tuned harmonics-to-noise ratio method gave the best results in both situations, ie for consonants and continuous speech. Using this method, the overall voicing of Czech, Polish, Hungarian and English was investigated. Hungarian speech showed the highest proportion of voiced parts, approx. 75 %. In other languages, the proportion of voiced parts was around 70 %.

Comparison of methods for determining speech voicing based on tests performed on paired consonants and continuous speech

Journal of Electrical Engineering

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Voicing is an important phonetic characteristic of speech. Each phoneme belongs to a group of either voiced or unvoiced sounds. We investigated and compared...

Comparison of methods for determining speech voicing based on tests performed on paired consonants and continuous speech

Published Online: Nov 15, 2022

Page range: 359 - 362

Received: Sep 08, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jee-2022-0049

Keywords
voiced and unvoiced speech, phonetics, evaluation of methods, statistical voicing characteristics of languages

© 2022 Jan Malucha et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Comparison of methods for determining speech voicing based on tests performed on paired consonants and continuous speech

Published Online: Nov 15, 2022

Page range: 359 - 362

Received: Sep 08, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jee-2022-0049

Keywordsvoiced and unvoiced speech, phonetics, evaluation of methods, statistical voicing characteristics of languages

© 2022 Jan Malucha et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
voiced and unvoiced speech, phonetics, evaluation of methods, statistical voicing characteristics of languages