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Estimating Formants by Linear Predictive Coding

The standard formant estimator and the source of most of the 72 acoustic measures in the seed paper beyond pitch. LPC fits a smooth all-pole model to the spectrum and reads the peaks of that model as formants — meaning reported formants are parameters of a fitted model, never direct observations.

Questions this Concept answers

Why is a reported formant better described as the output of a model than as a direct observation?

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Linear Prediction and Formant Estimation in Speech Signal Processing

The source-filter model of speech treats vocal production as an excitation source (glottal pulses from vocal fold vibration, or noise for unvoiced sound) passing through a time-varying filter represe…