Subjective and objective experiments on the influence of speaker's gender on the unvoiced segments

TL;DR

This study investigates how a speaker's gender affects unvoiced speech sounds through subjective and objective experiments, revealing that unvoiced segments are largely speaker-independent and not strongly influenced by gender.

Contribution

It provides new evidence that unvoiced speech segments are minimally affected by speaker gender, using both perceptual tests and HMM-based recognition experiments.

Findings

Humans cannot reliably distinguish gender-altered unvoiced segments.

Recognition performance is only slightly affected when testing across genders.

Unvoiced sounds are largely speaker-independent in terms of gender influence.

Abstract

Subjective and objective experiments are conducted to understand the extent to which a speaker's gender influences the acoustics of unvoiced (U) sounds. U segments of utterances are replaced by the corresponding segments of a speaker of opposite gender to prepare modified utterances. Humans are asked to judge if the modified utterance is spoken by one or two speakers. The experiments show that human subjects are unable to distinguish the modified from the original. Thus, listeners are able to identify the U segments irrespective of the gender, which may be based on some speaker-independent invariant acoustic cues. To test if this finding is purely a perceptual phenomenon, objective experiments are also conducted. Gender specific HMM based phoneme recognition systems are trained using the TIMIT training set and tested on (a) utterances spoken by the same gender (b) utterances spoken by the opposite gender and (c) the modified utterances of the test set. As expected, the performance is the highest for case (a) and the lowest for case (b). The performance degrades only slightly for case (c). This result shows that the speaker's gender does not as strongly influence the acoustics of U sounds as they do the voiced sounds.