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1. Cortical tracking of voice pitch in the presence of multiple speakers depends on selective attention

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.828546  

   Brodbeck, Christian; Simon, Jonathan Z. (August 2022, Frontiers in Neuroscience)

   Voice pitch carries linguistic and non-linguistic information. Previous studies have described cortical tracking of voice pitch in clean speech, with responses reflecting both pitch strength and pitch value. However, pitch is also a powerful cue for auditory stream segregation, especially when competing streams have pitch differing in fundamental frequency, as is the case when multiple speakers talk simultaneously. We therefore investigated how cortical speech pitch tracking is affected in the presence of a second, task-irrelevant speaker. We analyzed human magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses to continuous narrative speech, presented either as a single talker in a quiet background or as a two-talker mixture of a male and a female speaker. In clean speech, voice pitch was associated with a right-dominant response, peaking at a latency of around 100 ms, consistent with previous electroencephalography and electrocorticography results. The response tracked both the presence of pitch and the relative value of the speaker’s fundamental frequency. In the two-talker mixture, the pitch of the attended speaker was tracked bilaterally, regardless of whether or not there was simultaneously present pitch in the speech of the irrelevant speaker. Pitch tracking for the irrelevant speaker was reduced: only the right hemisphere still significantly tracked pitch of the unattended speaker, and only during intervals in which no pitch was present in the attended talker’s speech. Taken together, these results suggest that pitch-based segregation of multiple speakers, at least as measured by macroscopic cortical tracking, is not entirely automatic but strongly dependent on selective attention. 

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2. Cortical tracking of voice pitch in the presence of multiple speakers depends on selective attention

   https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.03.471122  

   Brodbeck, Christian M..; Simon, Jonathan Z. (July 2022, Frontiers in neuroscience)

   Voice pitch carries linguistic as well as non-linguistic information. Previous studies have described cortical tracking of voice pitch in clean speech, with responses reflecting both pitch strength and pitch value. However, pitch is also a powerful cue for auditory stream segregation, especially when competing streams have pitch differing in fundamental frequency, as is the case when multiple speakers talk simultaneously. We therefore investigated how cortical speech pitch tracking is affected in the presence of a second, task-irrelevant speaker. We analyzed human magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses to continuous narrative speech, presented either as a single talker in a quiet background, or as a two-talker mixture of a male and a female speaker. In clean speech, voice pitch was associated with a right-dominant response, peaking at a latency of around 100 ms, consistent with previous EEG and ECoG results. The response tracked both the presence of pitch as well as the relative value of the speaker’s fundamental frequency. In the two-talker mixture, pitch of the attended speaker was tracked bilaterally, regardless of whether or not there was simultaneously present pitch in the speech of the irrelevant speaker. Pitch tracking for the irrelevant speaker was reduced: only the right hemisphere still significantly tracked pitch of the unattended speaker, and only during intervals in which no pitch was present in the attended talker’s speech. Taken together, these results suggest that pitch-based segregation of multiple speakers, at least as measured by macroscopic cortical tracking, is not entirely automatic but strongly dependent on selective attention. 

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3. Effectiveness of Voice Quality Features in Detecting Depression

   https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1399  

   Afshan, Amber; Guo, Jinxi; Park, Soo Jin; Ravi, Vijay; Flint, Jonathan; Alwan, Abeer (September 2018, Interspeech 2018)

   Automatic assessment of depression from speech signals is affected by variabilities in acoustic content and speakers. In this study, we focused on addressing these variabilities. We used a database comprised of recordings of interviews from a large number of female speakers: 735 individuals suffering from depressive (dysthymia and major depression) and anxiety disorders (generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder with or without agoraphobia) and 953 healthy individuals. Leveraging this unique and extensive database, we built an i-vector framework. In order to capture various aspects of speech signals, we used voice quality features in addition to conventional cepstral features. The features (F0, F1, F2, F3, H1-H2, H2-H4, H4-H2k, A1, A2, A3, and CPP) were inspired by a psychoacoustic model of voice quality [1]. An i-vector-based system using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and another using voice quality features was developed. Voice quality features performed as well as MFCCs. A score-level fusion was then used to combine these two systems, resulting in a 6% relative improvement in accuracy in comparison with the i-vector system based on MFCCs alone. The system was robust even when the duration of the utterances was shortened to 10 seconds. 

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4. Speaker discrimination performance for “easy” versus “hard” voices in style-matched and -mismatched speech

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0009585  

   Afshan, Amber; Kreiman, Jody; Alwan, Abeer (February 2022, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   This study compares human speaker discrimination performance for read speech versus casual conversations and explores differences between unfamiliar voices that are “easy” versus “hard” to “tell together” versus “tell apart.” Thirty listeners were asked whether pairs of short style-matched or -mismatched, text-independent utterances represented the same or different speakers. Listeners performed better when stimuli were style-matched, particularly in read speech−read speech trials (equal error rate, EER, of 6.96% versus 15.12% in conversation–conversation trials). In contrast, the EER was 20.68% for the style-mismatched condition. When styles were matched, listeners' confidence was higher when speakers were the same versus different; however, style variation caused decreases in listeners' confidence for the “same speaker” trials, suggesting a higher dependency of this task on within-speaker variability. The speakers who were “easy” or “hard” to “tell together” were not the same as those who were “easy” or “hard” to “tell apart.” Analysis of speaker acoustic spaces suggested that the difference observed in human approaches to “same speaker” and “different speaker” tasks depends primarily on listeners' different perceptual strategies when dealing with within- versus between-speaker acoustic variability. 

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5. Individual Variation in Language Attitudes Toward Voice-AI: The Role of Listeners’ Autistic-Like Traits

   https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2020-1339  

   Cohn, Michelle; Sarian, Melina; Predeck, Kristin; Zellou, Georgia (October 2020, Proceedings of Interspeech)

   null (Ed.)

   More and more, humans are engaging with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems that have names (e.g., Alexa), apparent genders, and even emotional expression; they are in many ways a growing ‘social’ presence. But to what extent do people display sociolinguistic attitudes, developed from human-human interaction, toward these disembodied text-to-speech (TTS) voices? And how might they vary based on the cognitive traits of the individual user? The current study addresses these questions, testing native English speakers’ judgments for 6 traits (intelligent, likeable, attractive, professional, human-like, and age) for a naturally-produced female human voice and the US-English default Amazon Alexa voice. Following exposure to the voices, participants completed these ratings for each speaker, as well as the Autism Quotient (AQ) survey, to assess individual differences in cognitive processing style. Results show differences in individuals’ ratings of the likeability and human-likeness of the human and AI talkers based on AQ score. Results suggest that humans transfer social assessment of human voices to voice-AI, but that the way they do so is mediated by their own cognitive characteristics. 

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