Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to extract informations of personal perception of speech based on the human sense of the voice quality. First, auditory experiments for similarity judgments of speakers and preference judgments of voice are performed by the method of paired comparisons. Thirteen [e] vowels are used as the speech samples. Next, five experiments for similarity judgments of voices are executed by using five commonly terms that describe the voice quality. Furthermore, acoustic parameters of speech are extracted by improved homomorphic prediction (IHPA).
As the results of analyses based on the correlational method and the multidimentional scaling technique, the following properties became clear. (1) Specific senses of the voice quality contribute to the perceptual judgments of the similarity of speakers and the preference of voices. (2) These informations of the voice quality are chiefly characterized by pitch frequency and higher-formant frequency.
