A Preliminary Study on Time-Domain Acoustic Characteristics of Chinese Syllable Signals

Abstract

There is a sound effect transformation phenomenon of Chinese syllables according to digital audio tests. A Chinese syllable is composed of an initial consonant and a vowel, both of which can be subdivided as well. If a syllable signal is trimmed in a proper way, the segmented signal can form a new Chinese syllable. This article focuses on studying initial consonant sound effect transformations. First, more than 9800 independent syllables have been extracted from the speech recordings of 7 adults. With the help of a self-developed software, each of syllable signals has been segmented and tested. By means of analyzing the structure of syllable signals, investigating the mechanism of phonetic changes, and categorizing the acoustic features of different syllable segments, the transforming rule of initial consonants has been revealed. It is proposed that the motion of vocal channel, rather than the syllable as a whole, should be regarded as accordance to make descriptions of the speech signal more accurately. This research can provide a good reference for the study of Chinese phonetics.