AN OPTIMIZED TIME-FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION FOR SPEECH ANALYSIS

In order to analyse and interpret speech signals, different time-frequ ency representations are used (e.g. spectrogram, Wigner-Ville distribu tion, wavelets). In this paper we construct within Cohen's class of ti me-frequency distributions the distribution that is optimally suited f or the representation of speech signals. Thereby we take advantage of the special time-frequency structure of speech expressed in the Elemen tary Waveform Speech Model (EWSM, d'Alessandro, 1990). As an applicati on we present an algorithm that extracts a point pattern in the time-f requency plane out of the speech signal using the optimized distributi on. Thus we get a very simple representation of the speech signal that is well interpretable both for non-stationary and for stationary spee ch segments. Furthermore this represention could serve as a base for f urther analysis (e.g. classification).