Synchronising speech segments with musical beats in Mandarin and English singing

Generating synthesised singing voice with models trained on speech data has many advantages due to the models' flexibility and controllability. However, since the information about the temporal relationship between segments and beats are lacking in speech training data, the synthesised singing may sound off-beat at times. Therefore, the availability of the information on the temporal relationship between speech segments and music beats is crucial. The current study investigated the segment-beat synchronisation in singing data, with hypotheses formed based on the linguistics theories of P-centre and sonority hierarchy. A Mandarin corpus and an English corpus of professional singing data were manually annotated and analysed. The results showed that the presence of musical beats was more dependent on segment duration than sonority. However, the sonority hierarchy and the P-centre theory were highly related to the location of beats. Mandarin and English demonstrated cross-linguistic variations despite exhibiting common patterns.

Phonemic restoration of interrupted locally time-reversed speech

Intelligibility of temporally degraded speech was investigated with locally time-reversed speech (LTR) and its interrupted version (ILTR). Control stimuli comprising interrupted speech (I) were also included. Speech stimuli consisted of 200 Japanese meaningful sentences. In interrupted stimuli, speech segments were alternated with either silent gaps or pink noise bursts. The noise bursts had a level of − 10, 0 or + 10 dB relative to the speech level. Segment duration varied from 20 to 160 ms for ILTR sentences, but was fixed at 160 ms for I sentences. At segment durations between 40 and 80 ms, severe reductions in intelligibility were observed for ILTR sentences, compared with LTR sentences. A substantial improvement in intelligibility (30–33%) was observed when 40-ms silent gaps in ILTR were replaced with 0- and + 10-dB noise. Noise with a level of − 10 dB had no effect on the intelligibility. These findings show that the combined effects of interruptions and temporal reversal of speech segments on intelligibility are greater than the sum of each individual effect. The results also support the idea that illusory continuity induced by high-level noise bursts improves the intelligibility of ILTR and I sentences.

Improved Information on Heart Examination Results Uses a 12-lead Discrete Electrocardiograph

The results of examination of the condition of the heart using an electrocardiograph are generally presented in an ecg paper. Using ecg paper because in the paper there are boxes that are used as guidelines for calculating wave amplitude and wave duration. If the required amplitude is information on peak amplitude and wave morphology information, then the duration is information on the value of segment duration, interval duration, and heart rate. As is known in the ECG paper the results of the examination that only some information is presented, so information that does not yet exist must be calculated manually using existing boxes. This manual calculation requires time and accuracy, so that this waiting time can cause the patient's disease stage to increase, and on the other hand that the lack of accuracy of the calculation can cause misdiagnosis. This study aims to provide information on clinical standard cardiac examination results using Electrocardiograph discrete (ECGd) and standard Electrocardiograph (ECGs). In ECGd, the leads of the heart signal are sampled at a frequency of 250 Hz so that it becomes discrete data. Maximum filtering on 1.6 mV treshold data discrete peak R is obtained in each cycle. The PQRST algorithm method is used to get the PQST peak and duration parameters. The results showed that the percentage of the amount of information from the ECGd examination was 82.4% while the results of the ECGs examination were 25.4%

Phonetic effects of morphology and context: Modeling the duration of word-final S in English with naïve discriminative learning

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differences between phonologically homophonous affixes, e.g. the different kinds of final [s] and [z] in English (Plag, Homann & Kunter 2017, Zimmermann 2016a). Such results are unexpected and unaccounted for in widely accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexical phonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticizedhas, and cliticizedis) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naïve discriminative learning and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker, Sims & Baayen 2019), indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with a wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.

Modeling the Duration of Word-Final S in English with Naive Discriminative Learning

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differencesbetween phonologically homophonous affixes, for example the different kinds offinal [s] and [z] in English (Plag et al. 2017, Zimmermann 2016). Such resultsare unexpected and unaccounted for in widely-accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett, 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexicalphonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticized has, and cliticized is) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naive discriminative learning, and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker et al., 2019) indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty, but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.

Prosodically Conditioned Consonant Duration in Djambarrpuyŋu

Cross-linguistically, segments typically lengthen because of proximity to prosodic events such as intonational phrase or phonological phrase boundaries, a phrasal accent, or due to lexical stress. Australian Indigenous languages have been claimed to operate somewhat differently in terms of prosodically conditioned consonant lengthening and strengthening. Consonants have been found to lengthen after a vowel bearing a phrasal pitch accent. It is further claimed that this post-tonic position is a position of prosodic strength in Australian languages. In this study, we investigate the effects of proximity to a phrasal pitch accent and prosodic constituent boundaries on the duration of stop and nasal consonants in words of varying lengths in Djambarrpuyŋu, an Australian Indigenous language spoken in northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia. Our results suggest that the post-tonic consonant position does not condition longer consonant duration compared with other word-medial consonants, with one exception: Intervocalic post-tonic consonants in disyllabic words are significantly longer than word-medial consonants elsewhere. Therefore, it appears that polysyllabic shortening has a strong effect on segment duration in these data. Word-initial position did not condition longer consonant duration than word-medial position. Further, initial consonants in higher-level prosodic domains had shorter consonant duration compared with domain-medial word-initial consonants. By contrast, domain-final lengthening was observed in our data, with word-final nasals preceding a pause found to be significantly longer than all other consonants. Taken together, these findings for Djambarrpuyŋu suggest that, unlike other Australian languages, post-tonic lengthening is not a cue to prosodic prominence, whereas prosodic domain-initial and -final duration patterns of consonants are like those that have been observed in other languages of the world.