A Semi-Automatic Approach to Create Large Gender- and Age-Balanced Speaker Corpora: Usefulness of Speaker Diarization & Identification

This paper presents a semi-automatic approach to create a diachronic corpus of voices balanced for speaker's age, gender, and recording period, according to 32 categories (2 genders, 4 age ranges and 4 recording periods). Corpora were selected at French National Institute of Audiovisual (INA) to obtain at least 30 speakers per category (a total of 960 speakers; only 874 have be found yet). For each speaker, speech excerpts were extracted from audiovisual documents using an automatic pipeline consisting of speech detection, background music and overlapped speech removal and speaker diarization, used to present clean speaker segments to human annotators identifying target speakers. This pipeline proved highly effective, cutting down manual processing by a factor of ten. Evaluation of the quality of the automatic processing and of the final output is provided. It shows the automatic processing compare to up-to-date process, and that the output provides high quality speech for most of the selected excerpts. This method shows promise for creating large corpora of known target speakers.

Evolution of Voices in French Audiovisual Media Across Genders and Age in a Diachronic Perspective

We present a diachronic acoustic analysis of the voice of 1023 speakers from French media archives. The speakers are spread across 32 categories based on four periods (years 1955/56, 1975/76, 1995/96, 2015/16), four age groups (20-35; 36-50; 51-65, >65), and two genders. The fundamental frequency ($F_0$) and the first four formants (F1-4) were estimated. Procedures used to ensure the quality of these estimations on heterogeneous data are described. From each speaker's $F_0$ distribution, the base-$F_0$ value was calculated to estimate the register. Average vocal tract length was estimated from formant frequencies. Base-$F_0$ and vocal tract length were fit by linear mixed models to evaluate how they may have changed across time periods and genders, corrected for age effects. Results show an effect of the period with a tendency to lower voices, independently of gender. A lowering of pitch is observed with age for female but not male speakers.