INFLUENCE OF TIME-VARYING PITCH ON TIMBRE: ``COHERENCE AND INCOHERENCE'' BASED ON SPECTRAL CENTROID

Arthi, S and Sreenivas, TV (2015) INFLUENCE OF TIME-VARYING PITCH ON TIMBRE: ``COHERENCE AND INCOHERENCE'' BASED ON SPECTRAL CENTROID. In: 40th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), APR 19-24, 2014, Brisbane, AUSTRALIA, pp. 4240-4244.

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Abstract

In this paper, the effect of time-varying pitch-glides on timbre perception of vowels is studied experimentally. While earlier studies show that stationary pitch is observed to be a significant dimension of timbre, we explore the effect of non-stationary pitch changes on the perception of vowel timbre using synthesized vowels. In each trial, three listeners rate perceptual timbre change using a MUSHRA-like (MUltiple Stimuli with Hidden Reference and Anchor) methodology. Results show that perceived timbre change is affected by the pitch-shift and nature of pitch-glide. Timbre change is observed to be monotonic with pitch-shift for all types of pitch-glides, implying larger the pitch-shift, higher the perceived timbre change. When the excitation is a pitch-glide, the vowel spectral centroid and the nature of pitch-glide interact. We observe that for vowels of higher spectral centroid, decreasing pitch-glides cause higher timbre change than the timbre change caused by increasing pitch-glides; vice-versa for vowel of lower spectral centroid. Thus, ``incoherent'' pitch-glides cause higher timbre change than the ``coherent'' pitch-glides.

Item Type:	Conference Proceedings
Series.:	International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing ICASSP
Publisher:	IEEE
Additional Information:	Copy right for this article belongs to the IEEE, 345 E 47TH ST, NEW YORK, NY 10017 USA
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Communication Engineering
Date Deposited:	19 Aug 2016 09:34
Last Modified:	19 Aug 2016 09:34
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/54294

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