The Effects of the Active Hypoxia to the Speech Signal Inharmonicity

Abstract

When the people are climbing on the mountain, they are exposed to decreased oxygen concentration in the tissue, which is commonly called the active hypoxia. This paper addressed the problem of an acute hypoxia that affects the speech signal at the altitude up to 2500 m. For the experiment, the speech signal database that contains the articulation of vowels was recorded at different alti¬tudes. This speech signal was processed by the originally developed algorithm, which extracted the fundamental frequency and the inharmonicity coefficient. Then, they were subjected to the analysis in order to derive the effects of the acute hypoxia. The results showed that the hypoxia level can be determined by the change of the inharmonicity coefficient. Accordingly, the degree of hypoxia can be estimated.