Hi everyone. I'm doing a study about the relationship between voice pitch and fatigue. I decided to do the analysis in PRAAT, since it seems the most user-friendly for a newbie in voice research. However, I'm not quite sure what pitch range to use. I was thinking of a pitch range of 100-500 Hz for females and 75-300 Hz for males. Will this be sufficient or shall I set a lower pitch floor in case of a creaky voice?
And is it better to get the average pitch of full phrases or do I have to get the pitch per word? (I want to determine the average pitch of a file of about 15 phrases).
Hello,
the formant frequencies of normal speech for a typical adult male voice lie between 85 to 180 Hertz and these of a female voice lie between 165 to 255 Hertz.
In my opinion, you would need to analyze each sound, means each syllable to get the most precise results. This would be a huge amount of work to do. May be you start with phrases and chose the most significant results to break them down to each word and from that point, the most significant results to syllables?
So, you would even see which vowel shows the most fatigue. That would be very interesting! Please keep me inform.
Best, Christin
Hello Hayley Vergeer
It depends on what you want to do of course, but I think the 100-500 Hz range for females and 85-300 Hz for male speakers should generally be fine. However, depending on your speakers you might need to tweak it further, like going up to 600Hz for female speakers, for example.
From what you describe it seems average pitch per phrase might be what you are after - though to be honest it's hard to say when you haven't said what your objective is. Good luck!
Values during creak are about 136–150 Hz for female speakers, and 77–85 Hz for male speakers. So, 100-500 Hz for females and 75-300 Hz for males would do fine. Maybe... a bit lower pitch floor for males.
Hello.
You can estimate the pitch ceiling and floor on a speaker by speaker basis based on the two-pass method: you first estimate range, obtain quartiles, multiple by coefficient and get range. This is directly implemented in Prosogram. I have used a similar approach estimating the range in my own research (10.1121/1.4922514; 10.5334/labphon.19; 10.1016/j.wocn.2018.09.010).
You can access the code on my github.
Best
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