Comparison of methods for determining speech voicing based on tests performed on paired consonants and continuous speech

Jan Malucha – Milan Sigmund

   Voicing is an important phonetic characteristic of speech. Each phoneme belongs to a group of either voiced or unvoiced sounds. We investigated and compared the performance of five algorithms widely used to estimate speech voicing. All algorithms were implemented in Matlab and tested on both short consonants and continuous speech. Phonetically paired consonants (voiced vs, unvoiced) and parts of read speech from audio books were used in the experiments. The tuned harmonics-to-noise ratio method gave the best results in both situations, ie for consonants and continuous speech. Using this method, the overall voicing of Czech, Polish, Hungarian and English was investigated. Hungarian speech showed the highest proportion of voiced parts, approx. 75 %. In other languages, the proportion of voiced parts was around 70 %.

Keywords: voiced and unvoiced speech, phonetics, evaluation of methods, statistical voicing characteristics of languages

[full-paper]