Analysis of aperiodicity in artistic Noh singing voice using an impulse sequence representation of excitation source

Aperiodicity in the voice source is caused by changes in the vocal fold vibrations, other than the normal quasi-periodicity and the turbulence at the glottis. The aperiodicity appears to be one of the main properties that is responsible for conveying the emotion in artistic voices. In this paper, the feasibility of representing the excitation source characteristics in artistic (Noh) singing voice by an impulse-like sequence in the time domain is examined. The impulses at the glottal closure instants contribute to the major excitation of the vocal tract system. The sequence of such impulses produces harmonics of the fundamental frequency in the spectrum. The amplitude variation or amplitude modulation (AM) of these impulses in the sequence contributes to the aperiodicity in the excitation, and can result in appearance of subharmonics in the spectrum. The variation in the impulse intervals or frequency modulation (FM) can also contribute to the aperiodicity in the excitation. The aperiodic component of the excitation in the Noh voice is examined in the impulse-like sequence derived from the signal using the single frequency filtering analysis. The effects of aperiodicity are explained for synthetic AM and FM sequences of impulses using spectrograms and saliency plots.