Automated Measurement of Vowel Formants in the Buckeye Corpus

Abstract

In recent years, corpus phonetics has become a rapidly expanding field. However, the lack of appropriate tools for automatic acoustic analysis hinders further development of the field. In this paper, we present a methodological study on the automatic extraction of vowel formants using both robust linear predictive coding (RLPC; Acoustic data were taken from the Buckeye corpus of English conversations. We varied two aspects of the analysis -preemphasis and LPC order -to optimize formant tracking results by speaker and vowel. We also show, based on the optimal results, the distribution of ten English vowels in the F1/F2 space in conversational speech.