On The Importance Of Vocal Tract Constriction For Speaker Characterization: The Whispered Speech Study

Characterizing speakers under stressed condition is a challenge because speakers deviate from the normal speech production process. Whispered speech is one among them that is produced by abducting the vocal folds to pass the air out of mouth. During this process, the airflow thus passed is influenced by the physiological structure of vocal tract, that can be described by the level of constriction in vocal tract during speech production. We believe such information may be helpful for capturing speaker traits in such scenarios. The vocal tract constriction evidence in combination with mel frequency cepstral coefficients is investigated for speaker recognition experiments. The studies are conducted on CHAINS corpus that includes both neutral and whispered speech. We find that considering the constriction evidence from vocal tract improves the speaker characterization for whispered speech and under different mismatched scenarios.