We are pleased to inform you that we are organizing a special session for the next Interspeech conference which will be held in Portland, Oregon, September 9-13, 2012.

This special session is entitled Glottal Source Processing: from Analysis to Applications.

Here is a rationale summary of this special session:

• Technical aspect: Most of current speech processing systems focus on the features generated by the vocal tract. However, the glottal source conveys complementary information which has been shown to be useful for voice pathology detection, emotion/voice quality recognition, speech synthesis, speaker identification etc. Therefore, researchers working on glottal analysis are usually spread out in several regular sessions dedicated to the particular topics. The goal of the present special session is to gather people interested in the glottal source processing to discuss new analysis techniques and investigate their applicability to various speech technology applications.

• Format of presentations: It depends upon the number of accepted papers. If there are only 6 papers, then oral presentations will be chosen. If the number of papers exceeds 10, we would prefer poster presentations. In order to privilege idea exchange between researchers, one could also think of an interactive poster presentation.

• Expected outcomes: The first outcome of the special session is to make the speech technology community more familiar with glottal analysis and aware of its importance in concrete applications. Another outcome is to foster interactions between the researchers working in analysis and applications. Researchers working in the glottal source analysis are typically not fully aware of the potential applicability of their methods, while application developers might not know all the current analysis methodologies and tools. There is thus a synergic aspect in gathering researcher from both sides together, possibly creating new collaborations.

• People involved: All the people working on, or desiring to learn more about speech analysis, speech production and the applicability of the glottal source within speech processing applications.