Energy separation in signal modulations with application to speech analysis

An efficient solution to the fundamental problem of estimating the time-varying amplitude envelope and instantaneous frequency of a real-valued signal that has both an AM and FM structure is provided. Nonlinear combinations of instantaneous signal outputs from the energy operator are used to separate its output energy product into its AM and FM components. The theoretical analysis is done first for continuous-time signals. Then several efficient algorithms are developed and compared for estimating the amplitude envelope and instantaneous frequency of discrete-time AM-FM signals. These energy separation algorithms are used to search for modulations in speech resonances, which are modeled using AM-FM signals to account for time-varying amplitude envelopes and instantaneous frequencies. The experimental results provide evidence that bandpass-filtered speech signals around speech formants contain amplitude and frequency modulations within a pitch period.<>