Designing a pneumatic bionic voice prosthesis : a statistical approach for source excitation generation

Farzaneh Ahmadi, Tomoki Toda

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperConference Paperpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

![CDATA[This study follows up on our pioneering work in designing a Pneumatic Bionic Voice (PBV) prosthesis for larynx amputees. PBV prostheses are electronic adaptations of the traditional Pneumatic Artificial Larynx (PAL) device. The PAL is a non-invasive mechanical voice source, driven exclusively by respiration and with an exceptionally high voice quality. Following the PAL design closely, the PBV prosthesis is anticipated to substitute the medical gold standard of voice prostheses by generating a similar voice quality while remaining non-invasive and non-surgical. This paper describes a statistical approach to estimate the excitation waveform of the PBV source using the PAL as a reference. A Gaussian mixture model of the joint probability density of respiration and PAL voice features is implemented to estimate the excitation waveform of the PBV. The evaluation on a database of more than two hours of continuous speech shows a close match between !" pattern and mel-cepstra of the estimated PBV source and the PAL. When used to re-synthesize the original speech, the intelligibility of the PBV speech remains high and is scored 7.1±0.4 compared to 7.9±0.15 of the original PAL source.]]
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of INTERSPEECH 2018, 2-6 September 2018, Hyderabad, India
PublisherInternational Speech Communication Association
Pages3142-3146
Number of pages5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018
EventINTERSPEECH (Conference) -
Duration: 2 Sept 2018 → …

Publication series

Name
ISSN (Print)2308-457X

Conference

ConferenceINTERSPEECH (Conference)
Period2/09/18 → …

Keywords

  • artificial larynx
  • bionics
  • laryngectomees
  • speech

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