SPEECH FORMANT FREQUENCY AND BANDWIDTH TRACKING USING MULTIBAND ENERGY DEMODULATION

In this paper, the amplitude and frequency (AM-FM) modulation model an d a multiband demodulation analysis scheme are applied to formant freq uency and bandwidth tracking of speech signals. Filtering by a bank of Gabor bandpass filters is performed to isolate each speech resonance in the signal. Next, the amplitude envelope (AM) and instantaneous fre quency (FM) are estimated for each band using the energy separation al gorithm (ESA). Short-time formant frequency and bandwidth estimates ar e obtained from the instantaneous amplitude and frequency signals; two frequency estimates are proposed and their relative merits are discus sed. The short-time estimates are used to compute the formant location s and bandwidths. Performance and computational issues of the algorith m are discussed. Overall, multiband demodulation analysis (MDA) is sho wn to be a useful tool for extracting information from the speech reso nances in the time-frequency plane. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of Ame rica.