Implications of glottal source for speaker and dialect identification

In this paper we explore the importance of speaker specific information carried in the glottal source. We time align utterances of two speakers speaking the same sentence from the TIMIT database of American English. We then extract the glottal flow derivative from each speaker and interchange them. Through time alignment and this glottal flow transformation, we can make a speaker of a northern dialect sound more like his southern counterpart. We also time align the utterances of two speakers of Spanish dialects speaking the same sentence and then perform the glottal waveform transformation. Through these processes a Peruvian speaker is made to sound more Cuban-like. From these experiments we conclude that significant speaker and dialect specific information, such as noise, breathiness or aspiration, and vocalization, is carried in the glottal signal