PERCEPTUAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF STATIC AND DYNAMIC FEATURES OF VOCAL-TRACT CHARACTERISTICS TO TALKER INDIVIDUALITY

Experiments were performed to investigate perceptual contributions of static and dynamic features of vocal tract characteristics to talker i ndividuality. An ARX (Auto-regressive with exogenous input) speech pro duction model was used to extract separately voice source and vocal tr act parameters from a Japanese sentence, /aoiueoie/ (''Say blue top'' in English) uttered by three males. The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT ) as applied to resolve formant trajectories of the speech signal into static and dynamic components. The perceptual contributions were quan titatively studied by systematically replacing the corresponding forma nt components of the sentences between the three talkers, Results of t he experiments show that the static (average) feature of the vocal tra ct is a primary cue to talker individuality.