>For reference, middle C is about 256 Hz; most men speak >about a fifth to an octave below that, so I'd say, make >it 100-160 Hz or so for the vowels; the consonants keep >going out up to 15kHz, but I'm sure with a 4kHz cutoff, >speech should be understandable. Most women speak about >around middle C, or perhaps a fifth about that for ones >with high voices, so perhaps 500Hz. It is remarkable that speech experts themselves cite a wide range of ranges for the fundamental. The union of the various ranges they cite is 50-500 Hz (just over three octaves), and I have several CD audio books where I've measured the readers going as low as 60 Hz, most commonly at the end of a sentence. I've seen one guy who went effortlessly up to 240 Hz and tailed off a sentence or so later at 60 Hz, but a two-octave range for a single speaker reading normally (which this guy was doing believe it or not) is the exception rather than the rule. Women easily get up into the 300's and kids go higher still. High-pitched voices are not as common on CD's as low for speech, though for singing of course a coloratura soprano will go much higher. All this is for F_0, the fundamental or first harmonic. (So why 0 you ask---well, it's just a misleading convention since F_1, F_2, etc. are not harmonics at all but resonance peaks in the vocal tract called formants.) The harmonics of interest go up to about the 40th harmonic (that's a *lot* of harmonics!), which at 100 Hz is 4KHz. Most speech work assumes a max of 5-6 KHz of speech-relevant signal for all phonemes. Vaughan -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.ml.org
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