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Voice Quality in Vocal Communication

Tutorial at INTERSPEECH 2007, Antwerp, Belgium

Until recently, voice quality and its functions in speech communication have been only marginally considered in the speech communication community. However, there is today some evidence that voice quality settings and voice quality modulations are playing a central role in human voice-based communication, i.e. speech, singing and other kinds of expressive vocalizations.

A challenging problem is the relationship between voice quality and prosody. Prosodic parameters are usually restricted to pitch, duration, pauses and some sort of intensity parameter. Voice quality is not usually considered in the prosodic field, which is more focused on intonation, accentuation and rhythm. However, synthesis of expressive speech has demonstrated that convincing natural sounding results are impossible to obtain without dealing with voice quality parameters.

Vocal expression of emotions and attitudes is one of the main domains of interest for voice quality research. Although it has been studied for a long time in psychology, it can be considered as an emerging research domain not only for speech recognition and synthesis, but also for speech coding and other areas of speech communication.

Voice quality is still a rather fuzzy concept: what is the timbre of a voice? How to measure and quantify vocal effort? What are the domains of variation of every day speech? What are the physical and perceptive correlates of voice quality? What are the relationships between voice quality and others aspects of prosody?

These matters and others will be addressed in the tutorial, according to the following table of contents: 

1. Introduction: emergence of voice quality research in speech communication
   1. expressive speech processing
   2. voice quality and voice pathology
   3. voice quality in singing and vocal coaching
2. Acoustic aspects of voice quality
   1. the voice source
   2. the vocal tract
   3. the gestures of voice quality
3. Functions of voice quality
   1. Prosody
   2. Singing in various cultures
   3. Expression, attitudes, emotions in speech and voice
4. Perception of  voice quality:
   1. Voice perceptual space and dimensions for the voice
   2. Verbal description of voice quality
   3. Perceptual evaluation of voice quality and applications
5. Processing voice quality
   1. Analysis of voice quality
   2. Synthesis of voice quality and expressive speech
   3. Gesture control of voice quality

Presenter

Christophe d’Alessandro
LIMSI-CNRS, Paris.

Short Bio

Christophe d'Alessandro received the B.S.  degree in Mathematics, the M.S  and the Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from Paris VI University, in 1983, 1984 and 1989, respectively.  He has been a permanent Researcher at LIMSI, a laboratory of the CNRS (French National Agency for Scientific Research), since october 1989. Prior to joining the CNRS, Dr. d'Alessandro has been a Lecturer in computer science at Paris XI University from october 1987 to october 1989. He also graduated in music, and he has been titular Organist at Sainte-Elisabeth in Paris, France, since 1992. Christophe d'Alessandro is « Directeur de Recherche » at the CNRS. He is the head of the “Situated Perception” group in the “Human-Machine Communication” department at LIMSI. His research interests include text-to-speech synthesis, signal processing for speech analysis and synthesis, perception and synthesis of intonation in speech and singing, voice source analysis and synthesis, speech synthesis assessment, gesture control of synthesis,  musical acoustics. Christophe d’Alessandro edited a book on text-to-speech conversion ‘Synthèse de la parole à partir du texte’. He also organized the first international workshop on Voice Quality: Functions, Analysis and Synthesis (VOQUAL'03)