Int J Speech Technol (2016) 19:707–716
DOI 10.1007/s10772-016-9363-3
Energy bands and spectral cues for Arabic vowels recognition
Karim Tahiry1 · Badia Mounir2 · Ilham Mounir2 · Abdelmajid Farchi1
Received: 6 May 2016 / Accepted: 12 August 2016 / Published online: 26 August 2016
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract The present study examines the short and long
Arabic vowels (/a/, /a:/, /i/, /i:/, /u/ and /u:/) with a new
approach based on three methods: formant frequencies
extraction, spectral moments and energy bands. Among
Arabic language characteristics compared to other lan-
guages are long vowels which can be pronounced with
different duration length. The formant frequencies are the
most exploited in characterizing vowels in different lan-
guages nevertheless using only formants was not very
significant for vowels identification especially when pro-
duction duration augments. Therefore, our approach is to
broaden previous studies and present new tools in order to
characterize long vowels compared to short ones.
Keywords Arabic vowels · Formants · Spectral moments ·
Energy bands
& Karim Tahiry
karim.tahiry@gmail.com
Badia Mounir
mounirbadia2014@gmail.com
Ilham Mounir
ilhamounir@gmail.com
Abdelmajid Farchi
abdelmajid.farchi1@gmail.com
1
IMII Laboratory, Faculty of Sciences & Technics, University
Hassan First, Settat, Morocco
2
IMII Laboratory Graduate School of Technology, University
Cadi Ayyad, Safi, Morocco
1 Introduction
Vowels are sounds produced with periodic vocal fold
vibration. The acoustic theory of speech production shows
that vowels can be modelled as a straight-sided tube closed
at one end (to model the closure phase of vocal fold
vibration) and opened at the lips end. Vowels also have a
point of greatest narrowing known as a constriction loca-
tion (Stevens and House 1955; Ladefoged 1985) that
divides the tube into a back cavity and a front cavity.
Varying the constriction location from the front to the back
of the tube causes changes predominantly to the first two
resonant frequencies (Formants F1 and F2) (Fant 1960).
In all languages, studying vowels have mostly interested
many researchers. Traditionally, vowels have been descri-
bed in terms of acoustic/phonetic variables. The progress in
signal processing research led to the introduction of the
spectrogram, which made speech energy distribution visi-
ble (Cooper et al. 1951), and led to a coherent
understanding of the physical mode of formants.
Thereafter, many studies have been realized on formants
with different purposes. In order to understand the physi-
ological changes in the vocal tract when producing vowels,
Sue Ellen Linville and Jennifer Linville and Rens (2001),
measured the first tree formants. They found that the vocal
tract lengthening is linked with vowel articulatory changes
and speaker gender. Other studies exploited formants to
identify vowels. Hillenbrand et al. (1995) based their work
on duration, fundamental frequency and formants to sep-
arate between American English vowels. In addition, some
researchers reported that the first two formants are most
important to identify vowels (Sakayori et al. 2002). They
Worked on Japanese isolated vowels identification. They
concluded that the first two formants F1 and F2 are the
most important cues for the vowel identification. They
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joined the same result of Thyer et al. (2000), on Australian
English vowel. Other experts in the field used formants to
differentiate between racial populations. Xue et al. (2006),
reported that Chinese male speakers have a lower F1
compared to that of white and African American speakers,
and lower F2 for Chinese and white American speakers
relative to that of African American speakers. For Arabic
vowels identification, Hafiz et al. (2008) provided an
algorithm based on formant transitions which presents over
90 % accuracy for vowels identification in continuous
speech samples. Other Arabic studies proposed a descrip-
tion and comparison of formant frequencies. This includes
the work of Anani (1999), who exhibited that the formants
values reflect the relationship between formant frequency
and articulatory configuration, for instance the progression
from open to close articulation produces a gradual reduc-
tion in the frequency of F1. Natour et al. (2010), worked on
comparison of Arabic vowel formants for males, females
and children with other languages namely French, German
and American English. They reported that Arabic language
presents a trend of generally lower F1 and F2 and higher F3
values. Moreover the formant dispersion of Arabic vowels
is similar to other studies.
Another aspect that has been considered in the study of
vowels starts from the fact that the vowel spectrum repre-
sents the features of the glottal source and the filter functions
of the vocal tract, and since the spectral moments combine
the spectral amplitude pattern of the glottal source and the
filter resonances of the vocal tract (Milenkovic and Forrest
1988), the formers became a very important tool in charac-
terizing vowels. Savela et al. (2007) found that the spectral
moments help to obtain a more comprehensive description of
vowel category. Pentti (2015), worked on spectral moments
to compare young children’s productions of consonant /s/ in
symmetrical vowel contexts (e.g. /isi, usu, ysy, ɑsɑ/). His
study exhibits significant effects of vowel co-articulation in
its spectral features, especially in the center of gravity.
Researchers have also studied vowels according to lan-
guages specifities. Indeed, some languages contain long
vowels (Japanese, Thai, Arabic…) which differ from the
short ones in terms of number and vocalic quantity. Tsu-
kada (2009), studied the time characterization of vowels.
He presented a comparative study between long and short
vowels in Standard Arabic, Japanese and Thai. He reported
that the duration of long vowels represents the double of
the short vowels duration. He also noticed that the ratio
between the duration of short and long vowels differ sig-
nificantly for the three languages.
Alghamdi (1998) conducted a comparative study
between long vowels and short ones in terms of frequency
for some Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Sudanese, Saudi).
Studying different dialects, he stated that F1 and F2 for-
mants of long vowels are different from those of short ones.
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Int J Speech Technol (2016) 19:707–716
Yet, Alotaibi and Hussain (2009) analysed the vowel for-
mants of standard Arabic from another perspective. They
confirmed that the long vowels formants F1 and F2 are
peripheral to those of short ones. They also showed that the
values of the formants F1 and F2 help to classify the
vowels; The vowel /a/ and /a:/ are characterized by a high
value of F1 (F1 [ 500 Hz) and the vowel /i/ and /i:/ have a
high value of F2 (F2 [ 1500 Hz).
The aim of this work is to study the Arabic vowels in
accordance with their production duration. The findings pre-
sented in this article are based on an acoustic study of Arabic
long vowels compared to short ones. The primary goal is to
determine whether and how the vowels acoustic features
(formants, spectral moments of energy and their variation in
the frequency bands) vary according to production time.
This paper will take the following organization. The first
section outlines the methods and tools employed and the
experiments carried out. The second section deals with the
presentation and the discussion of the results. Finally, the
last section, will provide a conclusion of this paper.
2 Methods
2.1 General processing
A set of experiments were conducted with the aim of
describing the behavior of long Arabic vowels compared to
the short ones. This part provides an outline of the
methodology involved in these experiments, including a
description of the data collection and the tools used in this
study.
The speech data was digitized with a 22,050 Hz sampling
rate. Tokens were extracted from the recordings using ‘Praat’
by isolating and determining the duration of each vowel. The
useful signals isolated are subsequently divided into time
segments of 11.6 ms with an overlap of 9.6 ms. Each segment
is first Hamming windowed and followed by Zero-Padding,
then a 512-point fast Fourier transform (FFT) is computed.
The FFT computes the modulation spectrum in each channel,
with a frequency resolution of 43 Hz. The edited portion of
the signal will be used in each treatment.
For our experiments, the first two formant frequencies
were first calculated using linear predictive coding method
(LPC). Then, the four spectral moments (center of gravity,
standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis) and energy in
frequency bands were derived.
2.2 Formants extraction method
To determine the speech signal formants (resonance fre-
quencies of the vocal tract), the most used method is Linear
Predictive coding (LPC). This method expresses each
Int J Speech Technol (2016) 19:707–716 709

sample of the signal as a linear combination of previous
samples. The coefficients of the obtained difference equa-
tion (predictive coefficients) characterize the formants. The
estimation of these coefficients is done by minimizing the
mean-square error between the predicted and the actual
signals. The LPC model supplies a smoothed spectral
through autoregressive modelling, the peaks of the spectral
envelope correspond to the formants.
2.3 Spectral moments
The spectral moments are features that describe the distribu-
tion of spectral energy within the frequency range of a vowel.
There are four different spectral moments: center of gravity,
standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis. The center of
gravity (CoG) or spectral mean represents the average of the
frequencies across the entire spectrum. The standard deviation
describes the extent to which the frequencies of the spectrum
deviate from the CoG. The skewness presents the asymmetry
in the shape of the spectrum between the frequencies above
and below the CoG and the kurtosis of the spectrum describes
the extent to which the spectrum differs from the Gaussian
distribution of the spectrum.
After general processing, for each frame, the probability
density function for the spectrum can be estimated by
normalization over all frequency components (Feng et al.
2011):
Pðfk Þ
PN2 1
k¼0 Pðfk Þ
where Pðfk Þ is the power spectrum fk ¼ 2fNq Nk ; k ¼
0; 1; . . .; ððN =2Þ  1Þ and N is the window length. fNq
indicates the Nyquist frequency. The coefficients of the
normalized power spectrum were computed as:
2 1
X
N
Mean; l¼ Pðfk Þfk
k¼0
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u N 1
uX
r¼t
2
signal into these frequency bands helps to capture its
acoustic changes. The six frequency bands considered in
this work are: Band 1: 0–400 Hz; Band 2: 400–800 Hz;
Band 3: 800–1500 Hz; Band 4:1200–2000 Hz; Band 5:
2000–3500 Hz and Band 6: 3500–5000 Hz.
2.5 Corpus
Five Moroccan speakers took part in the study (three males
and two females). Speakers were asked to repeat isolated
syllables CV (C: consonant and V: vowel) with short and
long vowels. The choice of isolated syllables instead of
words is motivated by the need to reduce the influence of
other phonemes on the studied vowels. Moreover the
length of the vowel can be extended freely.
The entire corpus was established with the consonant /ʔ/
: /‫ﺀ‬/ because its production induces minimal stress on the
vocal tract (Table 1).
3 Results and discussion
3.1 Formants
The first purpose of this part is to study the formant fre-
quencies of the six Arabic vowels (three shorts and three
longs) with enlargement of the production duration of the
long ones. Only the first two formant values of vowels were
ð1Þ considered as they are the most important cues for the
vowel identification relative to other formants. Figures 1, 2
and 3 show the values of these formants (F1 and F2) for
each vowel. It can be seen that, for all vowels, the formant
values present no noticeable changes when increasing the
production duration of vowel.
With regard to the first formant, the vowel /a/ presents
the highest value compared to that of vowels /i/ and /u/.
ð2Þ This behavior can be explained by the fact that the closer
the tongue is to the roof of the mouth, the lower is F1
(Fig. 4). This result is similar to that obtained by (Lade-

Standard deviation ðfk  lÞ2 Pðfk Þ ð3Þ foged, 1962).

k¼0 In addition, the vowel /i/ presents the highest second
  formant value F2. This can be explained by the place of
2 1
X
N
fk  l 3 dorsum height of the tongue during the production: when
Skewness ¼ Pðfk Þ ð4Þ
k¼0
r

2 1
X  N  Table 1 Arabic corpus of long and short vowels
fk  l 4
Kurtosis ¼ 3 þ Pðfk Þ: ð5Þ
k¼0
r Vowel /a/ Vowel /i/ Vowel /u/

/‫أ‬/ : /ʔa/ /‫ﺉ‬/ : /ʔi/ /‫ﺅ‬/ : /ʔu/

/‫ﺋﺎ‬/ : /ʔaa/ /‫ﻱ‬/ : /‫ﺉ‬ii/ /‫ﺅﻭ‬/ : /ʔuu/
2.4 Energy bands
/‫ﺋﺎﺍ‬/ : /ʔaaa/ /‫ﺋﻴﻲ‬/ : /ʔiii/ /‫ﺅﻭﻭ‬/ : /ʔuuu/
/‫ﺋﺎﺍﺍ‬/ : /ʔaaaa/ /‫ﺋﻴﻴﻲ‬/ : /ʔiiii/ /‫ﺅﻭﻭﻭ‬/ : /ʔuuuu/
Looking at vowels spectrogram and taking into account the
/‫ﺋﺎﺍﺍﺍ‬/ : /ʔaaaaa/ /‫ﺋﻴﻴﻴﻲ‬/ : /ʔiiiii/ /‫ﺅﻭﻭﻭﻭ‬/ : /ʔuuuuu/
energy distribution, six bands were observed. Dividing the

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vowel /a/ vowel production. Afterwards, these values tend to stabi-

1400 lize at an equilibrium point at which CoG remains
1200 sensitively constant. The behavior of CoG can be explained
1000 by the fact that when the vowel production starts, the
800 tongue executes some specific movements (from high to
600 low or front to back) to reach a vocal tract steady state
400 position. These observations rise two phases:
200 ● A transient phase which represents the beginning of
0 vowel production and during which two different
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2
behavior were observed:
F1 F2
● For the vowels /a/ and /u/, CoG decreases rapidly.
Fig. 1 F1 and F2 formants of vowel /a/ according to the production Indeed, when the duration production of /a/ and /u/
duration
is longer the tongue moves to back position in the
vowel /i/ vocal tract and then F2 values decrease which
3000
explains the CoG behavior.
● For the vowel /i/, the CoG variation is different. It
2500
starts by getting higher then it decreases to reach a
2000
steady state. This can be explained by the fact that
1500 the tongue executes two different movements.
1000 Firstly, it moves to front position in the vocal tract
500 then F2 values increases, and secondly, it moves
0 closer to the roof of mouth then F1 values decrease.
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2
● A steady phase where the vocal tract is stable and then
F1 F2
the CoG presents smooth variations. In addition, the
Fig. 2 F1 and F2 formants of vowel /i/ according to the production CoG bandwidth of vowel /i/ is larger comparing to
duration those of /a/ and /u/ (Table 2).This is due to the fact that
F1 formant value of /i/ is far from F2 formant one.
vowel /u/
The investigation of the skewness and kurtosis (see
1000
Figs. 7, 8 and Table 2) shows that: All values are positive;
800 the greater amount of acoustic energy is located in the low
600 frequency range and the shape of the spectrum is more
peaked that the normal distribution.
400
The kurtosis values and bandwidth of vowel /u/ are more
200 important than those of /a/ and /i/ vowels since for /u/ both
0
formants F1 and F2 are located in low frequencies. These
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 results are consistent with those of (Savela 2009).
F1 F2
3.3 Energy bands
Fig. 3 F1 and F2 formants of vowel /u/ according to the production
duration
The third goal of this study is to investigate the energy
distribution of vowels (/a/, /i/ and /u/) in the frequency
the tongue is displaced to the front, F2 value increases bands according to production duration. The obtained
(Fig. 4). results are summarized in Figs. 9, 10 and 11. All vowels
have a significant energy in the first band since they are
3.2 Spectral moments voiced sounds. Moreover, the production duration has no
noticeable effect on the percentage distribution of energy
The second purpose of this paper is to study the spectral bands.
moments of Arabic vowels. Figures 5 and 6 shows the We can see from Fig. 9 that, for vowel /a/, the most
evolution of CoG and STD according to the production energy is located in the first five bands. This is due to the
duration of vowels /a/, /u/ and /i/. A great variability of the distribution of formants F1, F2 and F3. The close distance
CoG and STD values is observed at the beginning of the between them provides an energy distribution which covers

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Fig. 4 Articulatory gestures of

vowels (/a/, /i/ and /u/) from
(Fant 1960)

Fig. 5 Spectral moments (a

CoG of /a/, b CoG of /u/and c
CoG of /i/) evolution according
to the production duration of
each vowel. (Color
figure online)

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Fig. 6 Spectral moments (a

STD of /a/, b STD of /u/ and c
STD of /i/) evolution according
to the production duration of
each vowel. (Color
figure online)

Table 2 Bandwidth spectral Vowels Spectral moments

moments for Arabic vowels
Centre of gravity Standard deviation Skewness Kurtosis

Bandwidth
/a/ 400–600 400–600 1.5–4 5–25
/i/ 300–800 500–1100 1–7 0–55
/u/ 250–300 120–200 4–14 100–450

all the five bands. Figure 10 shows that the energy of vowel which is concentrated in the low frequency and overlapped
/i/ is concentrated in the first and fifth bands, with the with the frequency band of glottal vibration. The energy in
maximum energy in first band. The energy in the first band fifth band is due to second formant frequency value which
can be explained by the first formant frequency value is in the high frequency. For the vowel /u/, the major

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Fig. 7 Spectral moments (a SK
of /a/, b SK of /u/ and c SK
of /i/) evolution according to the
production duration of each
vowel. (Color figure online)
energy is focused in the first band, because the first two
formants are concentrated in the low frequencies and the
distance between them is small.
3.4 Discussion
The characterization of Arabic vowels by formant fre-
quencies, spectral moments and energy bands reveals that
their behaviour depends on their place of articulation than
on their production duration.
713
Variations in vowel spectral moments values are more
likely to be dependent on the place of articulation than on
the increase of the production duration. Indeed, this study
has shown that the CoG and STD behavior consists of two
phases; A transient phase at the beginning of vowel pro-
duction and a steady state phase when duration increases.
In the first phase, some differences were observed
according to place of articulation of studied vowel. The
movement of articulators when producing /i/ leads first to
an increase of CoG and SDT values then these values tend
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Fig. 8 Spectral moments (a K
of /a/, b K of /u/ and c K of /i/)
evolution according to the
production duration of each
vowel. (Color figure online)
to decrease to reach a steady position. For the vowels /a/
and /u/, CoG and SDT values start by a rapid, respectively
moderate lessening before attaining a stable position.
Indeed, for these two vowels the tongue gets to a back
position in the vocal tract when production duration takes
longer and therefore the F2 frequencies decrease.
By examining Kurtosis values, the main result is that
this coefficient seems to be more sensitive to lips rounding
much more than the position of tongue (backing or height)
in the vocal tract. Indeed /u/ shows the highest values
compared with /a/ and /i/ even when production duration
increases.
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Int J Speech Technol (2016) 19:707–716
Considering the Skewness, all the values are positive
regardless the duration which suggests that the distribution
of acoustic energy remains located in the low frequency
range and the shape of the spectrum is more peaked than
the normal distribution.
This work has also considered whether or not the
duration of production has an impact on the realization of
studied vowels in terms of frequencies F1 and F2. No
significant changes have been noted. However, it is pos-
sible to point out some relevant differences between these
vowels (/i/: F2 [ 2000 − F1 \ 300; /a/:
F2 [ 1000 − F1 [ 600; /u/: F2 \ 1000 − F1 [ 300). These
Int J Speech Technol (2016) 19:707–716 715

vowel /a/ /i/ from /u/ (for /i/, B5 is around 10 % and for /u/, B5 is
60 around 0 %).
50

40
4 Conclusion
30

20 In this paper, a new approach has been presented to study

10 Arabic Vowels behaviour when increasing their production
0 duration. This approach is based on 3 methods: formant
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 frequencies extraction, spectral moments and energy bands
B1% B2% B3% B4% B5% B6% calculation. The results show that both the formant fre-
Fig. 9 Energy bands of vowel /a/ according to the production quencies and the energy bands can differentiate between
duration. (Color figure online) Arabic vowels. Spectral moments (CoG and STD) re-veal
that the production of vowels is done in two phases; A
vowel /i/ transient phase at the beginning of vowel production and a
100
steady state phase when duration increases.
In sum it has been possible throughout this work to
80
characterize short Arabic vowels from long ones. Taking
60 into consideration that vowel length affects the meaning of
words in Arabic language. The findings of this study would
40
constitute a support for speech recognition.
20

0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2

B1% B2% B3% B4% B5% B6%

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