Short Description

The electro-larynx (EL) is a hand-held, battery-driven device. It is one possibility to regain speech for people who had to undergo an operation, where the larynx and the containing vocal folds were removed (typically due to larynx cancer). The device is held against the throat and its vibrations are transmitted through the neck. Then the patient can create speech by modulating the energy in the vocal tract.

We are in the process of designing a new speaking aid that improves significantly on the current state-of-the-art. One important issue is how to design a voice that is perceptually adequate for your gender. Some parameters to use are quite obvious, like fundamental frequency. Changing f0 alone, does not convincingly change a male to a female voice.”

Your Tasks

• Design an experiment to determine perceptually relevant parameters for the gender perception of a voice
• Carry out perception tests
• Evaluation of the results

Your Profile

• Motivation and interest in the topic
• Background in speech signal processing
• Background in either Matlab, Python or Julia

Contact

Martin Hagmüller (hagmueller@tugraz.at or 0316/873 4377)