Hi there,
I am trying to recreate a vowel continuum as published by Bidelman et al. 2013, see below:
"To this end, a synthetic five-step vowel continuum was constructed such that each token differed minimally acoustically, yet was perceived categorically (Pisoni, 1973). This was accomplished by varying a single acoustic dimension across the stimuli, namely first formant frequency (F1). Each token was 100 ms including 10-ms of rise/fall time in order to reduce spectral splatter in the stimuli. Tokens contained identical voice fundamental (F0), second (F2), and third formant (F3) frequencies (F0: 100, F2: 1090 and F3: 2350 Hz, respectively) chosen to match prototypical productions from male speakers (Peterson and Barney, 1952). The critical stimulus variation was achieved by parameterizing first formant (F1) over five equal steps between 430 and 730 Hz such that the resultant stimulus set spanned a perceptual phonetic continuum from /u/ to /a/ (Fig. 1a). Stimuli were synthesized with a cascade formant synthesizer implemented in MATLAB using the techniques described by Klatt and colleagues (Klatt and Klatt, 1990)."
I tried to use a recreation of the Klatt synthesizer (https://github.com/chdh/klatt-syn), and entered the following:
F0 = 100 Hz
F1 = 430 (505, 580, 655, 730 according to the five parametrical steps)
F2 = 1090 Hz
F3 = 2350 Hz
When using the synthesizer in the web browser, the /u/ sound does not entirely sound like u, it is a bit strange. There are also various other setting on the website for which I do not know if they need to be adjusted. I wondered if anybody has experience with speech synthesis and can advise further whether this is all correct.
Thank you!
Anton
I am trying to recreate a vowel continuum as published by Bidelman et al. 2013, see below:
"To this end, a synthetic five-step vowel continuum was constructed such that each token differed minimally acoustically, yet was perceived categorically (Pisoni, 1973). This was accomplished by varying a single acoustic dimension across the stimuli, namely first formant frequency (F1). Each token was 100 ms including 10-ms of rise/fall time in order to reduce spectral splatter in the stimuli. Tokens contained identical voice fundamental (F0), second (F2), and third formant (F3) frequencies (F0: 100, F2: 1090 and F3: 2350 Hz, respectively) chosen to match prototypical productions from male speakers (Peterson and Barney, 1952). The critical stimulus variation was achieved by parameterizing first formant (F1) over five equal steps between 430 and 730 Hz such that the resultant stimulus set spanned a perceptual phonetic continuum from /u/ to /a/ (Fig. 1a). Stimuli were synthesized with a cascade formant synthesizer implemented in MATLAB using the techniques described by Klatt and colleagues (Klatt and Klatt, 1990)."
I tried to use a recreation of the Klatt synthesizer (https://github.com/chdh/klatt-syn), and entered the following:
F0 = 100 Hz
F1 = 430 (505, 580, 655, 730 according to the five parametrical steps)
F2 = 1090 Hz
F3 = 2350 Hz
When using the synthesizer in the web browser, the /u/ sound does not entirely sound like u, it is a bit strange. There are also various other setting on the website for which I do not know if they need to be adjusted. I wondered if anybody has experience with speech synthesis and can advise further whether this is all correct.
Thank you!
Anton
