Abstract
More reliable pitch of the voice can be extracted easily from the vibration of the outer skin of the trachea than from speech sounds. To pick up the vibration of the outer skin of the trachea, the microphone (MR 103) of about 25mm in diameter was used with the rubber adapter ring around it, providing about 5mm thick air interspace between the microphone and the skin and bringing its circumference contact with the skin. The waveform picked up by this microphone is much simple and apparent of the periodicity of the pitch period, besides, it is affected little by the change of the resonance property of the vocal tract and the condition of the pronounciation. The pitch extracted by this method was proved to be superior to the one extracted from the voiced sound by misextracting detection and hearing set with vocoder. This method is promissing for the basic study on the pitch in speech, and it will also be useful as the standard of the extraction of the pitch for the trial to improve the pitch extractor from the speech sounds.
