soundgen (version 1.3.2)

estimateVTL: Estimate vocal tract length

Description

Estimates the length of vocal tract based on formant frequencies, assuming that the vocal tract can be modeled as a tube open at both ends. Algorithm: first formant dispersion is estimated using the regression method described in Reby et al. (2005) "Red deer stags use formants as assessment cues during intrasexual agonistic interactions". The length of vocal tract is then calculated as \(speed of sound / 2 / formant dispersion\). See also schwa for VTL estimation with additional information on formant frequencies.

Usage

estimateVTL(formants, speedSound = 35400, checkFormat = TRUE)

Arguments

formants

a character string like "aaui" referring to default presets for speaker "M1"; a vector of formant frequencies; or a list of formant times, frequencies, amplitudes, and bandwidths, with a single value of each for static or multiple values of each for moving formants.

speedSound

speed of sound in warm air, cm/s. Stevens (2000) "Acoustic phonetics", p. 138

checkFormat

if TRUE, expands shorthand format specifications into the canonical form of a list with four components: time, frequency, amplitude and bandwidth for each format (as returned by the internal function reformatFormants)

Value

Returns the estimated vocal tract length in cm.

Examples

# NOT RUN {
estimateVTL(NA)
estimateVTL(500)
estimateVTL(c(600, 1850, 3100))
estimateVTL(formants = list(f1 = 600, f2 = 1650, f3 = 2400))

# for moving formants, frequencies are averaged over time,
# i.e. this is identical to the previous example
estimateVTL(formants = list(f1 = c(500, 700), f2 = 1650, f3 = c(2200, 2600)))
# }