Formant comparison between whispered and voiced vowels in Mandarin

Formant shifting quantities of whispered vowels are important to both whispered acoustic analysis and reconstruction of normal speech from whispered speech, but no research on Chinese whispered formant has been reported. In this paper, an improved dynamic programming (IDP) algorithm for formant tracking is proposed, and the differences between whispered formants and voiced formants in Mandarin vowels are statistically analyzed. Experiments were performed on six Mandarin simple vowels /i/, /d/, /a/, /o/, /e/, and /u/ with four tones uttered by 20 speakers. It is concluded that the Mandarin whispered formants shift to higher frequencies and expand to wider bandwidths. On the other hand, the formant changes might carry some whispered tonal information.