[no subject]

[Matt Winn <mwinn83@xxxxxxxxx>]

Brittany,
You might have success exploring other software for your 
voice pitch changes. Praat is freeware designed specifically for speech 
analysis/manipulation, and the pitch manipulation is very strong. It is 
called PSOLA (pitch-synchronous overlap-add), and can be used to change 
duration as well. I have found that other software changes gross 
spectral properties even though you only want a pitch change - Praat 
avoids these. There is also a Matlab package called Straight that has 
been used to perform some of the manipulations you mention. 
Some of 
those gross spectral properties (e.g. locations and relative amplitudes 
of the formants) can be strong cues for gender (or at least talker 
size). These cues go by different names and are sometimes elusive in 
measurement. Among these are harmonicity, spectral tilt and glottal open
 quotient. If these have been altered, it might explain some of the 
pitfalls you mentioned in your post. To put it simply, if you multiply 
F0 by 2, you want to avoid multiplying the formants by the same amount. I
 suspect that GarageBand and Audacity might not be successful at that. 

There is a lot of stuff out there on vocal quality measurement, and there doesn't seem to be one conclusive way to measure it. This work is summed up nicely here:

Maryn, Roy, De Bodt, Van Cauwenberge, and Corthals (2009). Acoustic measurement of overall voice quality: A meta-analysis. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 126, Issue 5, pp. 2619-2634

Regarding acoustic cues for gender, you might want to check out this recent paper:

Hillenbrand, J.M., and Clark, M.J. (2009). The role of F0 and formant frequencies in distinguishing the voices of men and women. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 71, 1150-1166.

I haven't looked at that one in a little while, but I'm sure that it contains sufficient information for this issue. 
Matt

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Brittany Guidone <brittanyguidone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear List,

To explain more about my original question:

I mainly want to know if "morphing" or "changing" the pitch of a male voice by positive 4 semi tones will change the components of the original male voice (before it was morphed) in a way that will make the two voices have different components or "make up" in comparison to one another, besides the fact that they will have different pitches.

In other words, when the pitch of a voice is changed in audacity or garage band then what other components of the voice are changed (besides the pitch shift)?

-Brittany
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry