Formant analysis

• Formants are perceptually defined.
• The corresponding physical property is the frequencies of resonances of the vocal tract.
• Formant analysis is useful as the position of the first two formants pretty much identifies a vowel.

 
• Motivation
• Obtaining candidate values
  • Peak picking on the smoothed spectrum
  • Peak picking on the LP spectrum
  • Factoring for the LP roots
• Fitting ``bumps''
• Combining candidates