A quasi-glottogram signal.

A novel, noninvasive experiment is proposed that reliably shows the strength of glottal oscillations. The quasi-glottogram (QGG) signal is generated from a microphone array that is trained to approximate the electroglottogram signal. The QGG may be useful to improve estimates of whether speech is voiced, to quantify partial voicing, and to reduce the phoneme effect when measuring the amplitude of speech signals. The technique is well adapted to the generation of text-to-speech systems, as it allows an estimate of the glottal flow during undisturbed, natural speech. For prosody studies, it can be used to provide an estimate of amplitude which is relatively unaffected by changes in phonemes, and is at least as reliable as standard estimators of amplitude.