Assessment of an analytical model of pitch control

By K. Kochis-Jennings, E.M. Finnegan, H.T. Hoffman, and I.R. Titze

The purpose of this study was to apply measures of laryngeal and respiratory activity, which were obtained during phonatory and speech tasks, to a current model of pitch control (Titze, 1994) to determine the extent to which the model correctly predicted the pitch produced by subjects. Four adult females (34-44 yr.) and two adult males (25 - 31yr.) participated in this study. Simultaneous recordings of sound pressure level, tracheal pressure, and laryngeal (TA and CT) muscle activity were obtained. Tracheal puncture was performed to measure tracheal pressure. The subjects were asked to produce an ascending glide and a sentence containing only voiced phonemes. For each subject, two repetitions of each task were analyzed. Each token was segmented into approximately 50 millisecond portions and mean measures of fundamental frequency, subglottal pressure, and laryngeal muscle activity were obtained for each segment. The data were applied to a current analytical model that predicts fundamental frequency based on the body-cover model (Titze, 1994).