Comparing measurement errors for formants in synthetic and natural vowels

The measurement of formant frequencies of vowels is among the most common measurements in speech studies, but measurements are known to be biased by the particular fundamental frequency (F0) exciting the formants. Approaches to reducing the errors were assessed in two experiments. In the first, synthetic vowels were constructed with five different first formant (F1) values and nine different F0 values; formant bandwidths, and higher formant frequencies, were constant. Input formant values were compared to manual measurements and automatic measures using the linear prediction coding-Burg algorithm, linear prediction closed-phase covariance, the weighted linear prediction-attenuated main excitation (WLP-AME) algorithm [Alku, Pohjalainen, Vainio, Laukkanen, and Story (2013). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 134(2), 1295-1313], spectra smoothed cepstrally and by averaging repeated discrete Fourier transforms. Formants were also measured manually from pruned reassigned spectrograms (RSs) [Fulop (2011). Speech Spectrum Analysis (Springer, Berlin)]. All but WLP-AME and RS had large errors in the direction of the strongest harmonic; the smallest errors occur with WLP-AME and RS. In the second experiment, these methods were used on vowels in isolated words spoken by four speakers. Results for the natural speech show that F0 bias affects all automatic methods, including WLP-AME; only the formants measured manually from RS appeared to be accurate. In addition, RS coped better with weaker formants and glottal fry.