TOWARDS THE MEASUREMENT OF THE ACTOR’S FORMANT IN FEMALE VOICES Sanya Tayal 1 , Simon Stone 2 and Peter Birkholz 2 1 PEC University of Technology, 2 Technische Universität Dresden sanyatayal24@gmail.com Abstract: The Actor’s Formant in professional male actors has been a subject of research for many years. It is a strong energy peak that lies in the frequency band between 3-4 kHz in the long-term average spectrum (LTAS) of a professional male actor’s voice. Results of perceptual analysis have shown that this concentration of energy has a correlation with the perceived voice quality. While the Actor’s Formant has been extensively studied in male subjects, there is little research pertaining to the Actor’s Formant in female voices. The aim of this study is to show evidence of the formation of an Actor’s Formant in the voices of females as a result of a short vocal warm-up exercise. LTAS results of six female subjects are analyzed and a significant increase in magnitudes of their spectra after the vocal warm up is observed in the region of 4-5 kHz. The study also proposes an experimental method to measure vocal tract transfer functions using transcutaneous excitation of vocal tract. The resulting transfer functions of the subjects are plausible and encourage further studies of formants in female actors and the general population as a whole using the proposed method. 1 Introduction The inherent difference between the voice of an actor and that of a regular person has been explained by the existence of the Actor’s Formant. The Actor’s Formant is a strong energy peak that lies in the frequency band between 3-4 kHz in the long-term average spectrum (LTAS) of a male actor’s (or, more generally, a professional male speaker’s) voice [1]. For a professional singer, a similar formant cluster at a lower frequency in the LTAS (2-3 KHz) is known as the Singer’s Formant. Results of perceptual analysis have shown that this concentration of energy has a correlation with the perceived voice quality. Although the Singer’s Formant can primarily be achieved through professional training, the Actor’s Formant has been found to exist even in untrained, perceptually pleasant male voices [1]. Leino et al. stated in [1] that the prominence of an Actor’s Formant can be increased by performing specific vocal exercises. He studied the immediate effects of vocal exercises on the voice of a Finnish male actor and found that the LTAS showed a stronger peak in the Actor’s Formant region. The exercises aim at producing the best vocal effects in terms of narrowing of the epilaryngeal region. Among other ways of achieving this, phonating into a straw has been proved to be an effective method to establish an Actor’s Formant cluster [7, 8]. While the Actor’s Formant has been extensively studied in male subjects, its existence for female subjects has not been conclusively demonstrated. Master et al. [4] did not find any evidence of an Actor’s Formant in her study comparing LTAS of voices of a group of actresses and non-actresses. Here, the participants did not perform any form of specific vocal exercises. However, she reported that Leino did find a peak at 4.3 KHz in both the groups, which was more pronounced in the case of actresses. Unfortunately, Leino never made these results publicly available. The method of calculating the LTAS is a very convenient and valuable tool for analyzing running speech and singing [3]. It provides information on the spectral distribution of a speech signal over a period of time [2]. In the LTAS, the short term variations in a speech signal are averaged out and the resulting spectrum can be used to study the voice source and the resonance or formant characteristics of the voice [2, 3]. In case of the actor’s voice, these