Pitch (i.e., fundamental frequency FO and fundamental period TO) occupies a key position in the acoustic speech signal. The prosodic information of an utterance is predominantly determined by this parameter. The ear is more sensitive to changes of fundamental frequency than to changes of other speech signal parameters by an order of magnitude. The quality of vocoded speech is essentially influenced by the quality and faultlessness of the pitch measure ment. Hence the importance of this parameter necessitates using good and reliable measurement methods. At first glance the task looks simple: one just has to detect the funda mental frequency or period of a quasi-periodic signal. For a number of reasons, however, the task of pitch determination has to be counted among the most difficult problems in speech analysis. 1) In principle, speech is a nonstationary process; the momentary position of the vocal tract may change abruptly at any time. This leads to drastic variations in the temporal structure of the signal, even between subsequent pitch periods, and assuming a quasi-periodic signal is often far from realistic. 2) Due to the flexibility of the human vocal tract and the wide variety of voices, there exist a multitude of possible temporal structures. Narrow-band formants at low harmonics (especially at the second or third harmonic) are an additional source of difficulty. 3) For an arbitrary speech signal uttered by an unknown speaker, the fundamental frequency can vary over a range of almost four octaves (50 to 800 Hz).

Provides the reader with a practical introduction to the wide range of important concepts that comprise the field of digital speech processing. Students of speech research and researchers working in the field can use this as a reference guide.

When Speech and Audio Signal Processing published in 1999, it stood out from its competition in its breadth of coverage and its accessible, intutiont-based style. This book was aimed at individual students and engineers excited about the broad span of audio processing and curious to understand the available techniques. Since then, with the advent of the iPod in 2001, the field of digital audio and music has exploded, leading to a much greater interest in the technical aspects of audio processing. This Second Edition will update and revise the original book to augment it with new material describing both the enabling technologies of digital music distribution (most significantly the MP3) and a range of exciting new research areas in automatic music content processing (such as automatic transcription, music similarity, etc.) that have emerged in the past five years, driven by the digital music revolution. New chapter topics include: Psychoacoustic Audio Coding, describing MP3 and related audio coding schemes based on psychoacoustic masking of quantization noise Music Transcription, including automatically deriving notes, beats, and chords from music signals. Music Information Retrieval, primarily focusing on audio-based genre classification, artist/style identification, and similarity estimation. Audio Source Separation, including multi-microphone beamforming, blind source separation, and the perception-inspired techniques usually referred to as Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA).

This handbook plays a fundamental role in sustainable progress in speech research and development. With an accessible format and with accompanying DVD-Rom, it targets three categories of readers: graduate students, professors and active researchers in academia, and engineers in industry who need to understand or implement some specific algorithms for their speech-related products. It is a superb source of application-oriented, authoritative and comprehensive information about these technologies, this work combines the established knowledge derived from research in such fast evolving disciplines as Signal Processing and Communications, Acoustics, Computer Science and Linguistics.

Hardbound. The fields of speech coding and synthesis have developed rapidly over the last decade. Text-to-text speech systems now produce reasonable quality speech, and currently available speech coders can transmit good quality speech at below 10kb/s. This, in combination with the ever-increasing speed of microprocessors and signal processing hardware, has resulted in a large number of practical applications. These applications in turn have stimulated research, and the number of papers published on speech coding and synthesis have proliferated rapidly. Reflecting periodically on such developments have inspired the publication of this book. Topics such as the effect of cross channel errors on coded speech and the determination of a proper pitch contour for synthesized speech are included.Both readers unfamiliar with the fields of speech coding and speech synthesis as well as those already working within the areas, will find the book of interest.

Advanced Techniques in Computing Sciences and Software Engineering includes a set of rigorously reviewed world-class manuscripts addressing and detailing state-of-the-art research projects in the areas of Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Systems Engineering and Sciences. Advanced Techniques in Computing Sciences and Software Engineering includes selected papers form the conference proceedings of the International Conference on Systems, Computing Sciences and Software Engineering (SCSS 2008) which was part of the International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information and Systems Sciences and Engineering (CISSE 2008).

Periodic signals can be decomposed into sets of sinusoids having frequencies that are integer multiples of a fundamental frequency. The problem of finding such fundamental frequencies from noisy observations is important in many speech and audio applications, where it is commonly referred to as pitch estimation. These applications include analysis, compression, separation, enhancement, automatic transcription and many more. In this book, an introduction to pitch estimation is given and a number of statistical methods for pitch estimation are presented. The basic signal models and associated estimation theoretical bounds are introduced, and the properties of speech and audio signals are discussed and illustrated. The presented methods include both single- and multi-pitch estimators based on statistical approaches, like maximum likelihood and maximum a posteriori methods, filtering methods based on both static and optimal adaptive designs, and subspace methods based on the principles of subspace orthogonality and shift-invariance. The application of these methods to analysis of speech and audio signals is demonstrated using both real and synthetic signals, and their performance is assessed under various conditions and their properties discussed. Finally, the estimators are compared in terms of computational and statistical efficiency, generalizability and robustness. Table of Contents: Fundamentals / Statistical Methods / Filtering Methods / Subspace Methods / Amplitude Estimation

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2006, held in Cancun, Mexico in November 2006. The 99 revised full papers presented together with three keynote articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 239 submissions. The papers cover ongoing research and mathematical methods.

The principles of signal processing are using widely in telecommunications, control systems, sensors, smartphones, tablets, TV, video- and photo-cameras, computers, audio systems, etc. Written by 43 experienced and well-respected experts from universities, research centres and industry from 14 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, Ecuador, France, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, UK, Ukraine and USA the 'Advances is Signal Processing: Reviews', Vol. 1, Book Series, contains 13 chapters from the signals and systems theory to real-world applications. The authors discuss existing issues and ways to overcome these problems as well as the new challenges arising in the field. The book concludes with methods for the efficient implementation of algorithms in hardware and software. The advantages and disadvantages of different approaches are presented in the context of practical examples.

Compiled by an international array of musical and technical specialists, this book deals with some of the most important topics in modern musical signal processing. Beginning with basic concepts, and leading to advanced applications, it covers such essential areas as sound synthesis (including detailed studies of physical modelling and granular synthesis) ,control signal synthesis, sound transformation (including convolution), analysis/resynthesis (phase vocodor, wavelets, analysis by chaotic functions), object-oriented and artificial intelligence representations, musical interfaces and the integration of signal processing techniques in concert performance.