Pitch freqency of male voice
Atsuto Miyata
characteristic of the speech. I've included raw plot of the speech,
spectrogram of the speech and now I've been struggling through the
determination of pitch frequency.
I'm using Medan's 'super resolution pitch determination' ('91).
It tells me that I've got a pitch freqency of around 120Hz for a
pronouceation of simple /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ /o/ (In Japanese).
I have heard that the pitch frequency are around 80 Hz for normal adult
male.
This is a project for my final year study in the university, and I don't
have a lot of knowledge in this field.
If someone could tell me what an adult pitch frequency should be for vowels,
I would appreciate it very much..
Thanks in advance,
Atsuto Miyata
Hubert Crepy
> It tells me that I've got a pitch freqency of around 120Hz for a
> pronouceation of simple /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ /o/ (In Japanese).
> I have heard that the pitch frequency are around 80 Hz for normal adult
> male.
Average pitch frequency will vary from individual to individual. That's
why some males sing Bass, some Barytone, and some Tenor.
I don't think 120Hz is too much out of range for an adult male, although
it probably is above average. (My own natural average pitch is around
70Hz (I sing Bass). 120Hz is less than one octave above that.)
Of course, instantaneous pitch will vary around that average during the
process of speaking (this modulation is part of prosody, for example a
rising tone at the end of a sentence usually indicates a question), and
of course, even more in the process of singing.
In "Pitch Determination of Speech Signals", W. Hess states:
<quote>
The fundamental frequency of human utterances can take on a wide range.
However, only a small part thereof is used for conversational speech.
(...) For an individual speaker, the distribution depends on the
experimental conditions, expecially on whether the distribution is taken
from conversational speech or from read text. F0 distributions taken
from read text show quite consistently that the interval of an octave is
rarely exceeded; displayed with F0 in terms of musical intervals, the
fundamental frequency distribution comes close to a normal distribution
(Risberg, 1961; Schultz-Coulon, 1975) (...) F0 distributions for
individual speakers or for certain groups of speakers (frequently for
selected social groups) have been published (...) A bibliography is
found in the paper by Boe and Rakotoforinga (1975).
Table: Range of the fundamental frequency observed in human speech (...)
Fairbanks (1940) 65 - 450 Hz
Risberg (1961) 50 - 310 Hz
Hadding-Koch (1962) 50 - 500 Hz
Shaffer (1964) 110- 500 Hz
Hollien (1972) 80 - 300 Hz
Rabiner et al. (1976) 50 - 500 Hz
Monsen & Engebretson (1977) 110 -250 Hz
"
--
Hubert Crepy - IBM France Speech R&D - remove spam-blocker from address
to answer me
James P. Salsman
use a single number to define the wavelength of brown light.
Speech is all a bunch of harmonic chords and percussion;
whether the chords are on key to a pitch has more to do with
their ratio to the pitch frequency than their absolute pitch
composition.
Cheers,
James
Hubert Crepy
I don't think anybody ever claimed that pitch was a full descriptor of
the speech signal.
In the context of a model (insist: a model, not real life) of the speech
production process that has a source of a sometimes pseudo-periodic
signal (vocal cords) and a sequence of filters (vocal tract), pitch is
defined as being the fundamental frequency of the model's
pseudoperiodical source.
In real-life, its estimate correlates well with observable phenomena and
is helpful in modelizing and understanding various events.
So, what's your point?
Juan Antonio Alvarez Gonzalez
and children 250 Hz Notice that the fundamental frequency changes in line
with the intonation so in a statement with a high fall the fundamental
frequency can show a decrease of even an octave, say from 160 Hz down to
80 Hz. Picth changes are also affected by emotions, registers etc.
Atsuto Miyata (a_mi...@ee.newcastle.edu.au) wrote:
> Hello, I'm trying to create a program in windows 95 to show the voice
> characteristic of the speech. I've included raw plot of the speech,
> spectrogram of the speech and now I've been struggling through the
> determination of pitch frequency.
> I'm using Medan's 'super resolution pitch determination' ('91).
> pronouceation of simple /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ /o/ (In Japanese).
> I have heard that the pitch frequency are around 80 Hz for normal adult
> male.
> have a lot of knowledge in this field.
> If someone could tell me what an adult pitch frequency should be for vowels,
> I would appreciate it very much..
> Thanks in advance,
> Atsuto Miyata
--
________________________________________________________________________________
Juan A. ALVAREZ GONZALEZ Universidad de Oviedo
E.U.I. Informatica Dpto. Filologia Anglogermanica
C/ Calvo Sotelo s/n Campus de Humanidades del Milan
33007 Oviedo SPAIN 33001 Oviedo SPAIN
Telf. +34 98 5103289
Fax +34 98 5103291 e-mail: ja...@pinon.ccu.uniovi.es
________________________________________________________________________________
Vaughan R. Pratt
>
> Trying to define the pitch of speech is like trying to
> use a single number to define the wavelength of brown light.
Hubert Crepy <cr...@fr.ibm.no-junk-mail.com> wrote:
>
>I don't think anybody ever claimed that pitch was a full descriptor of
>the speech signal.
>In the context of a model (insist: a model, not real life) of the speech
>production process that has a source of a sometimes pseudo-periodic
>signal (vocal cords) and a sequence of filters (vocal tract), pitch is
>defined as being the fundamental frequency of the model's
>pseudoperiodical source.
Gee, and there I was thinking that pitch was the rate at which the vocal
cords vibrate. Silly me. :)
What is the definition of fundamental frequency? The section on pitch
extraction in Chapter 3 of Eric Metois' Ph.D. thesis,
http://www.media.mit.edu/~metois/Phd/dissert/Thesis3.html
has a subsection titled "A lack of rigorous definition" that could be
taken as grist for Salsman's mill. Anyone offering a rigorous
definition of pitch should check whether their definition lives up to
Metois' standards.
Vaughan Pratt
James P. Salsman
Thanks for your post:
>... I was thinking that pitch was the rate at which the vocal
> cords vibrate....
Exactly; there is more than one cord, and they vibrate in a
complex system of muscles, ligaments, skin, and other tissue.
Speaking of homophonic ambiguity, the sound that "vocal cords"
produce are "vocal chords"! I hope if I ever have to talk about
that topic, that I will not have to do so in English.
Cheers,
James
Reid, Diane (EXCHANGE:SKY:6S23)
term "vocal folds". There are some interesting videos by
otolaryngologists (sp?) what show that these folds ripple instead of
vibrate. I've seen a video on the vocal apparatus, aimed more at
singers, but still applicable to anybody interested in speach. There is
a hospital in Montreal, Canada that does research in this area.
Diane
--
Diane R. Reid
employed by Nortel Networks in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada