Relationship between fundamental and formant frequency in whispered Mandarin

The objective of this paper is to clarify the role of formant frequency in the perception of pitch in whispered Mandarin. A method of instantaneous frequency estimation is applied to the tracking of whispered speech formant frequencies. The formant frequencies data of whispered Mandarin reveal the relationship between the formant frequencies of whispered Mandarin vowels and gender and tone. Furthermore, an estimation method of F0 is proposed based on the gender and tone information. The experiments of listening test on reconstruction of normal speech from whispered speech show that the proposed method is suitable.