Study of Telugu vowels using acoustic features

Speech is the most important mode of communication among humans. Speech signal carries information about the human speech production system that produces it. Changes in the acoustic features of speech signal can be due to several reasons, including language, speaker, prosody and emotions etc. In this paper, the acoustic features of Telugu speech signals are examined. Since changes in their production characteristics are expected to be relatively more prominent in the vowel regions, these features are examined there. A `IIIT Sri City Telugu Vowel Database' (IIITS TVDB) is collected, especially from the native Telugu speakers. Three features are derived from the speech signal: the instantaneous fundamental frequency as the excitation source feature, four formants as the vocal tract system features, and signal energy as a combined feature of the source and the system. Features are extracted from the speech signal using auto-correlation and linear prediction (LP) analysis of the short-time signal segments, at different time-instants. Changes in the features for five Telugu vowels, corresponding to five English vowels, are examined. A preliminary analysis is carried out using the parameters mean and standard deviation of the changes in these production features. Characteristics of the Telugu vowels are analyzed. The database created may also be helpful for other related studies and applications.