Acoustic Characterization of the Noise Sources for the Kabyle Fricatives Consonants

The study is centered on the exploration of human speech sound production, acoustic modeling, and signal analysis. It introduces an experimental framework designed to acoustically characterize the Kabyle phonological system, with a specific focus on fricative consonants. In this research, to compute the transfer function of the vocal tract, we utilized a Pseudo-Random Excitation method (PRE), this method grants us the capability to calculate the noise source spectrum. We compiled a database of vocal tract transfer functions for various fricative consonants, including [s, f, ʃ, v, Ʒ, z, ћ, h, ʕ, ç, ʝ], as pronounced by two female and two male Kabyle language speakers. Through an analysis grounded in direct measurements on human subjects, we scrutinized the resonance and anti-resonance frequencies within the ensemble-averaged fricative spectra. Furthermore, we calculated the noise source spectra for all the studied phonemes and compared the results with findings from previous studies. Interestingly, in some cases, we observed a similar trend in the results, despite variations in experimental conditions.