One-formant vocal tract modeling for glottal pulse shape estimation

This work considers the task of estimating the source and filter from human voice signals. Since the energy of voiced sound concentrates on discrete frequencies, a notable challenge with this task would be that higher pitches in the signal can make the harmonically related frequency response samples of the vocal tract filter an incomplete representation. In view of this, we propose to model the magnitude and phase response of the first formant as an alternative to the minimum phase property of the vocal tract filter. In particular, the magnitude response of the vocal tract filter sampled at the first three partials only, is sufficient for determining the phase response of the first formant. We verified our new method with glottal pulse shape parameter estimation experiments conducted on the CMU Arctic dataset, which showed that single-formant filter is an adequate alternative to minimum-phase filter in vocal tract modeling for glottal pulse shape estimation.