The paper deals with the listener's memory of speaker individualities included in an utterance as a first step toward the realization of a voice montage system. A brief description is first given on the methodology to extract expressions in Japanese to represent voice qualities relevant to speaker individualities of an utterance, being followed by a display of the expressions derived. The degradation of listener's memory of speaker individualities was evaluated as a function of time using the expressions. Statistical analyses revealed that the within-listener variation of the memory was considerably small but the between-listener variation could not always be disregarded, depending on the speaker characteristics of an utterance: a distinctive utterance had the tendency of long preservation in the memory, but an "average" utterance was retained with less confidence. This utterance-dependent characteristic of the memory was also supported by the speaker identification experiments performed under different schemes.

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From a series of the experiments on the expressive speech in terms of the information of personality impressions, quantitative relations between speech sounds and personality impressions were found. Prosodic features such as speech rate, pauses, and intonations were manipulated to synthesize the continua of speech stimuli. Participants were asked to rate their impressions on these stimuli using Big Five personality traits. The results indicated that each trait had a distinctive change pattern, while reversed U-shape patterns were their common characteristics. In other words, each personality trait could be estimated with a quadratic regression equation. In this equation, use of sensory scales converted from physical scales leads more accurate estimates. Further, by integrating these five equations, the whole personality impression could be re-constructed. This procedure can be useful to synthesize speech sounds with artificial personalities, and summarized as a model.

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A versatile speech analysis, modification and resynthesis system TANDEM-STRAIGHT and voice morphing based on it are introduced in relation to classical ideas starting from VOCODER in 1939. Interactive graphical user interfaces for direct manipulation of parameters and morphing parameters are also introduced to provide hints for readers to find make use of the procedures. Also an application of morphing procedure for detecting a high level auditory after effects in gender perception are introduced to highlight a prospective strategy for using morphing as a microscope in perceptual research.

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'Ma' is important 'Kansei information' (the opposite concept of 'logical information') in communication. In all the cultures of Japan 'Ma' has been of great importance. Consequently there are a large number of descriptions that deal with 'Ma' qualitatively, but not quantitatively. The quantitative researches about 'Ma'in speech and music are reported in this paper. The psychological and physical data on 'Ma' were obtained by experiments and measurements. Following points at issue are discussed here: the suitable length of 'Ma', the relationship between the length of 'Ma' and breathing, the role of 'Ma' in expressing and/or understanding speaker's intention and emotion and the role of the switching pause('Ma') in building a relationship with the conversational partner.

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Speech disfluency has lately attracted considerable attention in the study of spontaneous speech. In one tradition, disfluencies are treated as the outcome of cognitive processes that run purely inside the speaker. In a second tradition, they are viewed as the result of certain strategies by which the speaker can have an effect on the addressees. This paper reviews our recent studies on disfluencies in Japanese spontaneous speech, putting particular emphasis on their functions in speech communication. Three studies, on word repetitions, fillers, and prolongation, are described in detail and discussed from the viewpoint of communicative strategies.

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