The mobile phone effect over the speech signal: an acoustic-phonetic analysis with implications for speaker verification in Brazilian Portuguese

Author(s)

Renata Regina Passetti

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2015-03-31

Examining board members

Plinio Almeida Barbosa; Maria Filomena Spatti Sândalo; Ana Carolina Constantini

• Advisor: Plinio Almeida Barbosa

Abstract

This dissertation evaluates the effects to speech signal due to telephone transmission of mobile phones and seeks to determine the degree of intra-speaker acoustic-phonetic modification caused by the mobile phone band-pass filter to the speech signal and the telephone transmission effects over the Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels by the study of the acoustic parameters affected by this kind of transmission. The analysis investigated which are the acoustic cues which are modified and which cues remain undifferentiated in the speaker's speech by the use of a mobile phone in comparison to direct recordings. The corpus used consists of simultaneous recordings of 10 male speakers in two conditions: via mobile phone and face-to-face, by placing a microphone directly in front of the subjects. The Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels were segmented and transcribed and the ForensicDataEvaluator script was used to automatically extract the following acoustic parameters: three first formants frequencies (F1, F2 and F3), median of fundamental frequency (F0), spectral emphasis, fundamental frequency baseline and F0 inter-peaks duration. The acoustic analyses aimed at investigating the telephone transmission effects over the Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels, over the speakers and at the speakers¿ vowel space. The analyses were supported statistically. The analysis of the telephone transmission effect over the Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels showed variations of 14% in the frequencies of the first and the third formants. The analysis of the scatter plot of F2 values showed that the mobile phone band-pass filtering has an effect of shifting upwards vowels with low values of F2 and shifting downwards vowels with high values of F2. For the analysis of the telephone transmission effects over the speaker only the acoustic parameters "fundamental frequency baseline" and "F0 inter-peaks duration" did not show any difference statistically significant between the two recording conditions, demonstrating robustness to the telephone transmission effects, which make them able to be considered as powerful parameters for forensic analysis. This analysis also revealed that the telephone transmission affects the speakers in different ways, which set them into different groups of speakers depending on the parameter analyzed. The analysis of the telephone effect in the speakers¿ vowel space shed some light on the previous analyses. In general, the increase of the F1 values in the mobile phone situation caused a global downward displacement of the vowel space. The decrease of the F2 values for the front vowels and the increase of the values of this formant for back vowels reduced the area of the vowel space for the most of the subjects. The vowels rearrangement at the vowel space in the telephone situation has some perceptual implications, since the lowering and reduction of the vowel space made the vowels be placed at its center, which could result in hearing these vowels as more open over the mobile phone (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 13/12516-1 - The mobile phone effect over the speech signal: an acoustic-phonetic analysis with implications for speaker verification in Brazilian Portuguese
• Grantee: Renata Regina Passetti
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master