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Articulation During Voice Disguise: A Pilot Study

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Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12997))

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Abstract

Speakers can conceal their identity by deliberately changing their speech characteristics, or disguising their voices. During voice disguise, speakers alter their normal movements of the articulators, such as tongue positions, according to a predetermined strategy. Even though technology for accurate articulatory measurements has existed for years, few studies have investigated articulation during voice disguise. In this pilot study, we recorded articulation of four speakers during regular and disguised speech using electromagnetic articulography. We analyzed imitation of foreign accents as a voice disguise strategy and utilized functional t-tests as a novel method for revealing articulatory differences between regular and disguised speech. In addition, we evaluated discovered articulatory differences in the light of the performance of an x-vector-based automatic speaker verification system.

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Acknowledgments

This project was partly funded by Academy of Finland (project 309629). Einar Meister’s work was supported by the European Regional Development Foundation (the project “Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies”). We thank Fabian Tomaschek for providing a set of R scripts for post processing of raw EMA data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

    Lauri Tavi

  2. School of Computing, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

    Lauri Tavi, Tomi Kinnunen & Rosa González-Hautamäki

  3. School of Information Technologies, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

    Einar Meister

  4. Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Anton Malmi

  5. Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Rosa González-Hautamäki

Authors
  1. Lauri Tavi
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  2. Tomi Kinnunen
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  3. Einar Meister
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  4. Rosa González-Hautamäki
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  5. Anton Malmi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lauri Tavi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Alexey Karpov

  2. Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia

    Rodmonga Potapova

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Tavi, L., Kinnunen, T., Meister, E., González-Hautamäki, R., Malmi, A. (2021). Articulation During Voice Disguise: A Pilot Study. In: Karpov, A., Potapova, R. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12997. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87802-3_61

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87802-3_61

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87801-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-87802-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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