Articulatory Configurations across Genders and Periods in French Radio and TV archives
This research addresses voice quality variations in linguistics and speech processing, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new archival data.
The study analyzed articulatory configurations across genders and periods using acoustic-to-articulatory inversion on French media archives from 1955 to 2015, finding that females have a higher larynx position and males have more protruded lips, with no evidence that females lowered their pitch over time.
This paper studies changes in articulatory configurations across genders and periods using an inversion from acoustic to articulatory parameters. From a diachronic corpus based on French media archives spanning 60 years from 1955 to 2015, automatic transcription and forced alignment allowed extracting the central frame of each vowel. More than one million frames were obtained from over a thousand speakers across gender and age categories. Their formants were used from these vocalic frames to fit the parameters of Maeda's articulatory model. Evaluations of the quality of these processes are provided. We focus here on two parameters of Maeda's model linked to total vocal tract length: the relative position of the larynx (higher for females) and the lips protrusion (more protruded for males). Implications for voice quality across genders are discussed. The effect across periods seems gender independent; thus, the assertion that females lowered their pitch with time is not supported.