Investigations on active perception in speech production and hearing systems

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Precise procedures for source information extraction were invented for providing an indispensable basis for further investigations. The major research goal, development of an F0 (fundamental frequency) control model based on an integration of findings of the head investigator in his previous investigations and "general theory of motor control" proposed by Kawato et.al., was yielded using data acquired by the new procedures. A working prototype of the model, a scat rendering model, was implemented based on a very high-quality speech analysis, modification and synthesis method, STRAIGHT, developed by the head investigator. A part of these accomplishments was presented at the 141st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and gave a strong impression on the participants. The impact resulted in an invitation to the 143rd meeting, which will be held in June 2002, as an invited talker.The new source information extraction procedures (for frequency domain, time domain and aperiodicity attributes) were also applied for developing procedures for voice quality analysis and resynthesis. The procedures were introduced at MAVEBA, an international conference held in Italy and also gave a strong impact. A typical example to demonstrate the power of the procedures is a paper presented at EUROSPEECH'2002 in Denmark. It illustrated that the new procedures are precise enough to detect systematic F0 glitches around consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant transitions and also powerful enough to penetrate into the origin of the phenomenon. In spite of the fact that the glitches are not caused by active interactions between perception and production, the finding and investigations have scientific importance and illustrates the usefulness of the procedures.Finally, the findings further suggest that a new, still vague, auditory information representation based on fixed-point concept will be emerged as an instantiation of a generalized auditory processing principle.