title: Analysis of high-frequency energy in long-term average spectra of singing, speech, and voiceless fricatives.
abstract: The human singing and speech spectrum includes energy above 5 kHz. To begin an in-depth exploration of this high-frequency energy (HFE), a database of anechoic high-fidelity recordings of singers and talkers was created and analyzed. Third-octave band analysis from the long-term average spectra showed that production level (soft vs normal vs loud), production mode (singing vs speech), and phoneme (for voiceless fricatives) all significantly affected HFE characteristics. Specifically, increased production level caused an increase in absolute HFE level, but a decrease in relative HFE level. Singing exhibited higher levels of HFE than speech in the soft and normal conditions, but not in the loud condition. Third-octave band levels distinguished phoneme class of voiceless fricatives. Female HFE levels were significantly greater than male levels only above 11 kHz. This information is pertinent to various areas of acoustics, including vocal tract modeling, voice synthesis, augmentative hearing technology (hearing aids and cochlear implants), and training/therapy for singing and speech.
authors.affiliation: National Center for Voice and Speech, University of Utah, 136 S. Main Street, Suite 320, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101, USA. bbmonson@email.arizona.edu
authors.forename: Brian B
authors.initials: BB
authors.lastname: Monson
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Lotto
authors.forename: Brad H
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Story
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012737:Sex Factors; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D063346:Singing; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014831:Voice; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult