Perceived naturalness of a synthesizer of disordered voices

Abstract

The presentation describes a synthesizer of normal and disordered voice timbres and their perceptual evaluation with respect to naturalness. The simulator uses a shaping function model, which enables controlling the perturbations of the frequency and harmonic richness of the glottal area signal via the control of the instantaneous frequency and amplitude of two harmonic driving functions. Several types of perturbations are simulated. Perceptual experiments, which involve stimuli of synthetic and human vowels with normal values of perturbations, have been carried out. The first has been based on a binary synthetic/natural classification. The second has involved a discrimination task. Both experiments suggest that human judges are unable to distinguish between human and synthetic vowels prepared with the synthesizer described here. Copyright © 2009 ISCA.