Voice And Speech Quality Perception

Foundations of Voice and Speech Quality Perception starts out with the fundamental question of: "How do listeners perceive voice and speech quality and how can these processes be modeled?" Any quantitative answers require measurements. This is natural for physical quantities but harder to imagine for perceptual measurands. This book approaches the problem by actually identifying major perceptual dimensions of voice and speech quality perception, defining units wherever possible and offering paradigms to position these dimensions into a structural skeleton of perceptual speech and voice quality. The emphasis is placed on voice and speech quality assessment of systems in artificial scenarios. Many scientific fields are involved. This book bridges the gap between two quite diverse fields, engineering and humanities, and establishes the new research area of Voice and Speech Quality Perception.

Speech perception has been the focus of innumerable studies over the past decades. While our abilities to recognize individuals by their voice state plays a central role in our everyday social interactions, limited scientific attention has been devoted to the perceptual and cerebral mechanisms underlying nonverbal information processing in voices. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception takes a comprehensive look at this emerging field and presents a selection of current research in voice perception. The forty chapters summarise the most exciting research from across several disciplines covering acoustical, clinical, evolutionary, cognitive, and computational perspectives. In particular, this handbook offers an invaluable window into the development and evolution of the 'vocal brain', and considers in detail the voice processing abilities of non-human animals or human infants. By providing a full and unique perspective on the recent developments in this burgeoning area of study, this text is an important and interdisciplinary resource for students, researchers, and scientific journalists interested in voice perception.

The Handbook of Speech Perception is a collection of forward-looking articles that offer a summary of the technical and theoretical accomplishments in this vital area of research on language. Now available in paperback, this uniquely comprehensive companion brings together in one volume the latest research conducted in speech perception Contains original contributions by leading researchers in the field Illustrates technical and theoretical accomplishments and challenges across the field of research and language Adds to a growing understanding of the far-reaching relevance of speech perception in the fields of phonetics, audiology and speech science, cognitive science, experimental psychology, behavioral neuroscience, computer science, and electrical engineering, among others.

This book interconnects two essential disciplines to study the perception of speech: Neuroscience and Quality of Experience, which to date have rarely been used together for the purposes of research on speech quality perception. In five key experiments, the book demonstrates the application of standard clinical methods in neurophysiology on the one hand and of methods used in fields of research concerned with speech quality perception on the other. Using this combination, the book shows that speech stimuli with different lengths and different quality impairments are accompanied by physiological reactions related to quality variations, e.g., a positive peak in an event-related potential. Furthermore, it demonstrates that – in most cases – quality impairment intensity has an impact on the intensity of physiological reactions.

Foundations of Voice Studies provides a comprehensive description and analysis of the multifaceted role that voice quality plays in human existence. Offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on all facets of voice perception, illustrating why listeners hear what they do and how they reach conclusions based on voice quality Integrates voice literature from a multitude of sources and disciplines Supplemented with practical and approachable examples, including a companion website with sound files at www.wiley.com/go/voicestudies Explores the choice of various voices in advertising and broadcasting, and voice perception in singing voices and forensic applications Provides a straightforward and thorough overview of vocal physiology and control

In this text, the editors aim to convert the mapping of speech patterns into mental representations. They cover theories of perception and cognition, issues in clinical speech pathology, and the practical concerns of speech technology.

This book addresses various aspects of acoustic–phonetic analysis, including voice quality and fundamental frequency, and the effects of speech fluency and non-native accents, by examining read speech, public speech, and conversations. Voice is a sexually dimorphic trait that can convey important biological and social information about the speaker, and empirical findings suggest that voice characteristics and preferences play an important role in both intra- and intersexual selection, such as competition and mating, and social evaluation. Discussing evaluation criteria like physical attractiveness, pleasantness, likability, and even persuasiveness and charisma, the book bridges the gap between social and biological views on voice attractiveness. It presents conceptual, methodological and empirical work applying methods such as passive listening tests, psychoacoustic rating experiments, and crowd-sourced and interactive scenarios and highlights the diversity not only of the methods used when studying voice attractiveness, but also of the domains investigated, such as politicians’ speech, experimental speed dating, speech synthesis, vocal pathology, and voice preferences in human interactions as well as in human–computer and human–robot interactions. By doing so, it identifies widespread and complementary approaches and establishes common ground for further research.

This book reviews research towards perceptual quality dimensions of synthetic speech, compares these findings with the state of the art, and derives a set of five universal perceptual quality dimensions for TTS signals. They are: (i) naturalness of voice, (ii) prosodic quality, (iii) fluency and intelligibility, (iv) absence of disturbances, and (v) calmness. Moreover, a test protocol for the efficient indentification of those dimensions in a listening test is introduced. Furthermore, several factors influencing these dimensions are examined. In addition, different techniques for the instrumental quality assessment of TTS signals are introduced, reviewed and tested. Finally, the requirements for the integration of an instrumental quality measure into a concatenative TTS system are examined.