Comparison of various automatic means for measuring mean fundamental frequency

The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the reliability of, and agreement among, six speech analysis systems in the determination of fundamental frequency. Five male and five female speakers provided oral reading and sustained vowel samples for analysis. Each sample was analyzed five times by each system. The results indicated high reliability for all of the systems for both sexes and both utterance types. Agreement among the systems was high for the male sustained vowels and the female oral reading samples. In contrast, poor agreement occurred among the systems for the male oral reading samples and the female sustained vowels. The findings indicate that the output of these automatic methods tends to be consistent over repeated trials within the systems in their extraction of fundamental frequency; however, agreement among these systems varies.