Special Session on Size in communication sounds

[Roy Patterson <roy.patterson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

We wanted to bring to everyone's attention that there will be a Special
Session at the ASA meeting in Vancouver concerning size perception in
communication sounds. Below is a version of the blurb that we wrote to the
technical committee to convince them that a special session was warranted.

If you find it interesting, please feel free to forward the message to
anyone you think relevant.
If you think you have a paper or poster to contribute please let one of us
know.

Regards, Roy Patterson and Toshio Irino


Special Session at ASA meeting in Vancouver, 16-20 May 2005

Physiological and Psychological Acoustics
Joint with Biomedical Ultrasound/Bioresponse to Vibration

Title: Size information in speech and animal calls

Program Organisers: Roy Patterson and Toshio Irino
Email:          rdp1@cam.ac.uk    irino@sys.wakayama-u.ac.jp

Abstract

There is size information in animal communication sounds; if two animals
differ only in size, the resonances of the larger animal will be lower in
frequency and expanded in time. For animals, size information is important
for assessing the sex of an individual and their ability to defend a
territory. In human speech, vocal tract length is a major component of
variability and the correct parsing of the variability is essential in
speech recognition both by humans and machines.

Recently, there have been important developments with respect to size in
communication sounds, some of which have been reported in JASA but many of
which have not. Fitch and colleagues have shown that there is a strong
correlation between vocal tract length and body size in most mammalian
species (Riede and Fitch, 1999; dogs), (Fitch, 1997; monkeys) and (Fitch
and Giedd, 1999), and that mammals have mechanisms for exaggerating their
size. Cohen (1993) has described an affine transformation that illustrates
how the size and shape information in sounds can be segregated, and Irino
and Patterson (2002) have argued that some form of this Mellin Transform
provides the basis for vowel normalization in speech communication. Welling
and Ney (2003) have demonstrated the importance of size in automatic speech
recognition. There are also earlier studies reporting the importance of
size information in bats (Altes, 1977) and frogs (Fairchild, 1981; Narins
and Smith, 1986) which have not received the appropriate attention.

It is also the case that Hideki Kawahara and Peter Boersma have produced
high-quality vocoders (STRAIGHT and PRAAT, respectively) that now enable us
manipulate the size information in natural speech. Several groups have used
STRAIGHT to study the perception of size in speech (e.g. Assmann and Neary,
2003; Kewley-Port (2003) and Smith and Patterson, 2004). Darwin and
Brungart (2003) have also demonstrated how PRAAT can be used to manipulate
the size information in speech.

As yet, these exciting developments are not widely known in the acoustics
community. Accordingly, we proposed a special session at the Vancouver
meeting to bring this new research area to the attention of JASA members,
along with the new tools for understanding and manipulating size in
communication sounds.

At the September meeting of the British Society of Audiology meeting, we
presented four posters on size perception. The posters are available on the
CNBH web site if you would like to learn a little about size perception
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/cnbh/         Posters/talks


* ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** ***
Roy D. Patterson
Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing
Physiology Department, University of Cambridge
Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EG

phone   44 (1223) 333819        office
fax     44 (1223) 333840        department
email   rdp1@cam.ac.uk
  or
email   roy.patterson@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~roy.patterson
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/cnbh

* ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** *** * ** ***
Roy D. Patterson
Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing
Physiology Department, University of Cambridge
Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EG

phone   44 (1223) 333819        office
fax     44 (1223) 333840        department
email   rdp1@cam.ac.uk
  or
email   roy.patterson@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~roy.patterson
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/cnbh