Information Rate Necessary to Transmit Pitch-Period Durations for Connected Speech

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the channel capacity necessary to transmit pitch-period duration values. Using a statistical approach, the average uncertainty (entropy) of a pitch-period duration value was calculated, taking into account knowledge about the just-preceding pitch-period duration value. The data consisted of utterances from 26 speakers (13 male and 13 female); a total of 12 576 pitch-period duration values was obtained. The results show that, for pitch-period duration values quantized within 50 t•sec, the theoretical channel capacity is 621 bit/sec, for the case where conditioning extends one duration value into the past.