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Acoustic Characterization of Amharic Vowel Sound Units

Published: 20 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Acoustic characterization of vowels has a significant role in the development of speech synthesis and recognition systems. Specifically, it reduces the improper vowel parameter selection for the concatenative and formant based speech synthesis systems. This paper studies the acoustic characteristics of Amharic vowel sound units. The characteristics of Amharic vowels are studied by considering 77 different contexts. All the seven vowels are labeled from different contexts, and then the first three formant frequencies (F1, F2, and F3) and duration acoustic features are extracted and analyzed for all vowels to characterize their quality and quantity behaviors. As a result, this study synthesizes the acoustic vowel space diagram by graphically illustrating where vowel sound units for the Amharic language are located in the acoustic space of the vocal tract tube. The effect of duration on the formant frequency values and the comparison of vowels via duration behavior are also investigated. The characterization demonstrates that F1 is inversely proportional to duration, while F2 and F3 are directly proportional to duration, and the vowels /e/, /a/, and /o/ are the long vowels, while /ix/ is a short vowel.

References

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    SSPS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 International Symposium on Signal Processing Systems
    September 2019
    188 pages
    ISBN:9781450362412
    DOI:10.1145/3364908
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 20 September 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. Acoustic vowel characterization
    2. Acoustic vowel space
    3. Amharic
    4. Formant frequency
    5. Vowel sound unit

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    • National Natural Science Foundation of China

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