Abstract
This work describes the development of an automatic estimator of perceptual femininity (PF) of an input utterance using speaker verification techniques. The estimator was designed for its clinical use and the target speakers are Gender Identity Disorder (GID) clients, especially MtF (Male to Female) transsexuals. The voice therapy for MtFs, which is conducted by the second author, comprises three kinds of training; 1) raising the baseline F 0 range, 2) changing the baseline voice quality, and 3) enhancing F 0 dynamics to produce an exaggerated intonation pattern. The first two focus on static acoustic properties of speech and the voice quality is mainly controlled by size and shape of the articulators, which can be acoustically characterized by the spectral envelope. Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) of F 0 values and spectrums were built separately for biologically male speakers and female ones. Using the four models, PF was estimated automatically for each of 142 utterances of 111 MtFs. The estimated values were compared with the PF values obtained through listening tests with 3 female and 6 male novice raters. Results showed very high correlation (R=0.86) between the two, which is comparable to the intra- and inter-rater correlation.
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Minematsu, N., Sakuraba, K. (2007). Development of a Femininity Estimator for Voice Therapy of Gender Identity Disorder Clients. In: Müller, C. (eds) Speaker Classification II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4441. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74122-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74122-0_3
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