Source-filter Comparison of Measurements of Fundamental Frequency Perturbation and Amplitude Perturbation for Synthesized Voice Signals

SUMMARY: An investigation of the effect of glottal source aperiodicities (jitter, shimmer, and aspiration noise) on the estimation of fundamental frequency (f0) perturbation and amplitude perturbation, of synthesized, glottal source and voiced speech waveforms, is considered. Firstly, 4, cycle-event f0 estimators are examined: (1) waveform matching of the low-pass filtered waveform, (2) positive peaks (PPs) from the speech waveform, (3) PPs from the low-pass filtered waveform, and (4) positive zero crossings from the low-pass filtered waveform. The analysis shows that f0 perturbation measures taken from the low-pass filtered waveform are affected by both amplitude perturbation and random glottal noise, whereas, f0 perturbation measures taken from the PPs of the original waveform are affected by noise but not by amplitude perturbation. It is shown for the low-pass filter methods that the effects of amplitude perturbation and noise lead to increased errors in the measurement of f0 perturbation for the synthesized speech waveforms when compared with the synthesized glottal waveforms. Shimmer of the synthesized speech waveform is approximately equal to shimmer of the synthesized glottal source. However, noise and jitter affect measures of amplitude perturbation. The estimation of f0 perturbation from the synthesized speech waveform is shown to be nonlinearly related to f0 perturbation estimation from the synthesized glottal waveform as a consequence of the filtering action of the vocal tract. Low-pass filtering the voiced speech waveform is shown to provide a partial solution to this problem.