Pitch "artifacts"

[Lena S]

When I look at the high and low pitches of my voice (I’m using Praat to do this), there are sometimes abnormally low lower bounds, around 40 hz. Is this to do with creaky voice in those recordings, or likely something else? From what I’ve seen, this would be normal if I were male, but I’m not.

[Simon]

Always remember that Praat is only showing an estimated value of F0, found using a method based on autocorrelation. Since Praat does not know a priori your F0 range, it uses a very wide range (75 to 600 Hz by default).

The low values you are seeing could either be truly low values (perhaps due to creaky voice as you suggest), or errors in estimation. To decide, you need to inspect the waveform closely and estimate the true fundamental period yourself.

If you are needing to find your minimum and maximum values of F0 in order to set parameters for automatic F0 estimation (“pitch tracking”), then you don’t need to include these extreme values: just aim to cover the majority of values, omitting outliers.

One approach used to set minimum and maximum automatically is to run the pitch tracker with a wide F0 range, plot a histogram of the resulting values across the whole database, and use that to choose tighter limits for a second run of the pitch tracker. (I’m not suggesting to do that, unless you are particularly interested in inspecting the F0 distribution.)

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