voice quality experiment | Homepage

Picture

Preliminary Discussion

In the above chart, x axis represents the ratings of the speaker in terms of nativeness; y axis represents number of ratings a particular score received (i.e., there are 4 people rated Voice 1 as 5). In general, it is not clear what does voice quality and environmental acoustics have to do with perception of speaker linguistic background. Biological and social indexical knowledge may be stored alongside linguistic information in the brain, according to the exemplar theory. As such, the acoustic encodings that are used for perception of linguistic background or speaker identification is very complex. Digital voice transformation used in this experiment is called Helium Breath, in the Apple Garageband software on Mac OS X 10.6.