ABSTRACT

A. Irmayani Pawelloi, A Study on the Difference of the Extracted Male’s and Female’s Speech Pitch Frequency (supervised by Zahir Zainuddin and Rhiza S. Sadjad).

This research project is a practical implementation of a well known fact that there is a considerable difference of the male’s and the female’s speech pitch frequency. The project is conducted at the Electrical Engineering Laboratory, Muhammadiyah University, Pare-Pare, South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

The speeches of eight adults, eight children and eight elderly persons – both male and female – saying “apa khabar” and “pelangi indah di pagi ini” are digitized and recorded in “.wav” formatted files. The recorded digital signals are filtered using the Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) high-pass digital filter with Butterworth response and then extracted using the auto-correlation method.

The best result has shown that the pitch frequency difference (Dfx) of adult male and female speeches saying “apa khabar” is 58,63 Hz and saying “pelangi indah di pagi ini” is 15,89 Hz. For elderly persons, the difference is much smaller, only 12,50 Hz for saying “apa khabar”, but a bit larger, 21,46 Hz, for saying “pelangi indah di pagi hari”. The pitch frequency difference of male and female children is not recognizable. 

Keywords: speech, signal extraction, pitch