The proportion of the population with acquired hearing loss is increasing worldwide. Specific typ... more The proportion of the population with acquired hearing loss is increasing worldwide. Specific types of hearing loss require the treatment with hearing implants. Cochlear implants and bone conduction hearing implants are two examples. The present contribution is a prospect of the underlying project in its early stadium. The project addresses new methods and technologies that improve spatial hearing with such implants. The methods are adjusted specifically for both types of hearing implants. For cochlear implants bioinspired signal processing methods are applied. For bone conduction implants new working principles for mechanical stimulation based on piezoelectric transducers are investigated. To evaluate the developments perceptional experiments are conducted, which investigate spatial hearing and speech intelligibility with normal-hearing and hearing-impaired persons. For this purpose a virtual listening environment is applied to synthesize different room acoustics, source positions,...
Voice morphing is a framework to generate a new sound which has the mixed attribute of given voic... more Voice morphing is a framework to generate a new sound which has the mixed attribute of given voice examples. It provides a flexible tool for investigating perceptual attributes in voice communication, especially for quantifying paralinguistic and extralinguistic cues. Recent advances in parametric representation of speech sounds have made the morphing-based approach a practical alternative or complementary strategy to procedures using speech-production models. Stimulus continuum spanning between two typical voice recordings having different perceptual attributes provides an external reference to quantify subjective responses. Generalized morphing, which enables extrapolation as well as interpolation of arbitrarily many numbers of voices, provides a unique strategy for investigating speaker identity. Its ability to selectively manipulate any combination of fundamental parameters facilitates the development of technology to intervene and mediate paralinguistic and extralinguistic comm...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2015
Prior adaptation to male (or female) voices causes androgynous voices to be perceived as more fem... more Prior adaptation to male (or female) voices causes androgynous voices to be perceived as more female (or male). Using a selective adaptation paradigm the authors investigate the relative impact of the vocal fold vibration rate (F0) and timbre (operationally in this paper as characteristics that differentiate two voices of the same F0 and loudness) on this basic voice gender aftereffect. TANDEM-STRAIGHT was used to morph between 10 pairs of male and female speakers uttering 2 different vowel-consonant-vowel sequences (20 continua). Adaptor stimuli had one parameter (either F0 or timbre) set at a clearly male or female level, while the other parameter was set at an androgynous level, as determined by an independent set of listeners. Compared to a control adaptation condition (in which both F0 and timbre were clearly male or female), aftereffects were clearly reduced in both F0 and timbre adaptation conditions. Critically, larger aftereffects were found after timbre adaptation (comprising androgynous F0) compared to F0 adaptation (comprising an androgynous timbre). Together these results suggest that timbre plays a larger role than F0 in voice gender adaptation. Finally, the authors found some evidence that individual differences among listeners reflect in part pre-experimental contact to male and female voices.
2013 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, 2013
ABSTRACT Voice morphing is a powerful tool for exploratory research and various applications. A t... more ABSTRACT Voice morphing is a powerful tool for exploratory research and various applications. A temporally variable multi-aspect morphing is extended to enable morphing of arbitrarily many voices in a single step procedure. The proposed method is implemented based on interference-free representations of periodic signals and found to yield highly-naturally sounding manipulated voices which are useful for investigating human perception of voice. The formulation of the proposed method is general enough to be applicable to other representations and easily modified depending on application needs.
While humans use their voice mainly for communicating information about the world, paralinguistic... more While humans use their voice mainly for communicating information about the world, paralinguistic cues in the voice signal convey rich dynamic information about a speaker's arousal and emotional state, and extralinguistic cues reflect more stable speaker characteristics including identity, biological sex and social gender, socioeconomic or regional background, and age. Here we review the anatomical and physiological bases for individual differences in the human voice, before discussing how recent methodological progress in voice morphing and voice synthesis has promoted research on current theoretical issues, such as how voices are mentally represented in the human brain. Special attention is dedicated to the distinction between the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar speakers, in everyday situations or in the forensic context, and on the processes and representational changes that accompany the learning of new voices. We describe how specific impairments and individual diffe...
The proportion of the population with acquired hearing loss is increasing worldwide. Specific typ... more The proportion of the population with acquired hearing loss is increasing worldwide. Specific types of hearing loss require the treatment with hearing implants. Cochlear implants and bone conduction hearing implants are two examples. The present contribution is a prospect of the underlying project in its early stadium. The project addresses new methods and technologies that improve spatial hearing with such implants. The methods are adjusted specifically for both types of hearing implants. For cochlear implants bioinspired signal processing methods are applied. For bone conduction implants new working principles for mechanical stimulation based on piezoelectric transducers are investigated. To evaluate the developments perceptional experiments are conducted, which investigate spatial hearing and speech intelligibility with normal-hearing and hearing-impaired persons. For this purpose a virtual listening environment is applied to synthesize different room acoustics, source positions,...
Voice morphing is a framework to generate a new sound which has the mixed attribute of given voic... more Voice morphing is a framework to generate a new sound which has the mixed attribute of given voice examples. It provides a flexible tool for investigating perceptual attributes in voice communication, especially for quantifying paralinguistic and extralinguistic cues. Recent advances in parametric representation of speech sounds have made the morphing-based approach a practical alternative or complementary strategy to procedures using speech-production models. Stimulus continuum spanning between two typical voice recordings having different perceptual attributes provides an external reference to quantify subjective responses. Generalized morphing, which enables extrapolation as well as interpolation of arbitrarily many numbers of voices, provides a unique strategy for investigating speaker identity. Its ability to selectively manipulate any combination of fundamental parameters facilitates the development of technology to intervene and mediate paralinguistic and extralinguistic comm...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2015
Prior adaptation to male (or female) voices causes androgynous voices to be perceived as more fem... more Prior adaptation to male (or female) voices causes androgynous voices to be perceived as more female (or male). Using a selective adaptation paradigm the authors investigate the relative impact of the vocal fold vibration rate (F0) and timbre (operationally in this paper as characteristics that differentiate two voices of the same F0 and loudness) on this basic voice gender aftereffect. TANDEM-STRAIGHT was used to morph between 10 pairs of male and female speakers uttering 2 different vowel-consonant-vowel sequences (20 continua). Adaptor stimuli had one parameter (either F0 or timbre) set at a clearly male or female level, while the other parameter was set at an androgynous level, as determined by an independent set of listeners. Compared to a control adaptation condition (in which both F0 and timbre were clearly male or female), aftereffects were clearly reduced in both F0 and timbre adaptation conditions. Critically, larger aftereffects were found after timbre adaptation (comprising androgynous F0) compared to F0 adaptation (comprising an androgynous timbre). Together these results suggest that timbre plays a larger role than F0 in voice gender adaptation. Finally, the authors found some evidence that individual differences among listeners reflect in part pre-experimental contact to male and female voices.
2013 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, 2013
ABSTRACT Voice morphing is a powerful tool for exploratory research and various applications. A t... more ABSTRACT Voice morphing is a powerful tool for exploratory research and various applications. A temporally variable multi-aspect morphing is extended to enable morphing of arbitrarily many voices in a single step procedure. The proposed method is implemented based on interference-free representations of periodic signals and found to yield highly-naturally sounding manipulated voices which are useful for investigating human perception of voice. The formulation of the proposed method is general enough to be applicable to other representations and easily modified depending on application needs.
While humans use their voice mainly for communicating information about the world, paralinguistic... more While humans use their voice mainly for communicating information about the world, paralinguistic cues in the voice signal convey rich dynamic information about a speaker's arousal and emotional state, and extralinguistic cues reflect more stable speaker characteristics including identity, biological sex and social gender, socioeconomic or regional background, and age. Here we review the anatomical and physiological bases for individual differences in the human voice, before discussing how recent methodological progress in voice morphing and voice synthesis has promoted research on current theoretical issues, such as how voices are mentally represented in the human brain. Special attention is dedicated to the distinction between the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar speakers, in everyday situations or in the forensic context, and on the processes and representational changes that accompany the learning of new voices. We describe how specific impairments and individual diffe...
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