This volume contains invited and contributed papers presented at the 9th International Summer School "Neural Nets E.R. Caianiello" on Nonlinear Speech Processing: Al- rithms and Analysis, held in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy, during September 13-18, 2004. The aim of this book is to provide primarily high-level tutorial coverage of the ?elds related to nonlinear methods for speech processing and analysis, including new approaches aimed at improving speech applications. Fourteen surveys are offered by specialists in the ?eld. Consequently, the volume may be used as a reference book on nonlinear methods for speech processing and an- ysis. Also included are ?fteen papers that present original contributions in the ?eld and complete the tutorials. The volume is divided into ?ve sections: Dealing with Nonlinearities in Speech S- nal, Acoustic-to-Articulatory Modeling of Speech Phenomena, Data Driven and Speech Processing Algorithms, Algorithms and Models Based on Speech Perception Mec- nisms, and Task-Oriented Speech Applications. Dealing with Nonlinearities in Speech Signals is an introductory section where n- linear aspects of the speech signal are introduced from three different points of view. The section includes three papers. The ?rst paper, authored by Anna Esposito and Maria Marinaro, is an attempt to introduce the concept of nonlinearity revising several nonl- ear phenomena observed in the acoustics, the production and the perception of speech. Also discussed is the engineering endeavor to model these phenomena.

Table of Contents:
Dealing with Nonlinearities in Speech Signals.- Some Notes on Nonlinearities of Speech.- Nonlinear Speech Processing: Overview and Possibilities in Speech Coding.- Signal Processing in a Nonlinear, NonGaussian, and Nonstationary World.- Acoustic-to-Articulatory Modeling of Speech Phenomena.- The Analysis of Voice Quality in Speech Processing.- Identification of Nonlinear Oscillator Models for Speech Analysis and Synthesis.- Speech Modelling Based on Acoustic-to-Articulatory Mapping.- Data Driven and Speech Processing Algorithms.- Underdetermined Blind Separation of Speech Signals with Delays in Different Time-Frequency Domains.- Data Driven Approaches to Speech and Language Processing.- Cepstrum-Based Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio Measurement in Voiced Speech.- Predictive Connectionist Approach to Speech Recognition.- Modeling Speech Based on Harmonic Plus Noise Models.- Algorithms and Models Based on Speech Perception Mechanisms.- Text Independent Methods for Speech Segmentation.- Nonlinear Adaptive Speech Enhancement Inspired by Early Auditory Processing.- Perceptive, Non-linear Speech Processing and Spiking Neural Networks.- Task Oriented Speech Applications.- An Algorithm to Estimate Anticausal Glottal Flow Component from Speech Signals.- Non-linear Speech Feature Extraction for Phoneme Classification and Speaker Recognition.- Segmental Scores Fusion for ALISP-Based GMM Text-Independent Speaker Verification.- On the Usefulness of Almost-Redundant Information for Pattern Recognition.- An Audio-Visual Imposture Scenario by Talking Face Animation.- Cryptographic-Speech-Key Generation Using the SVM Technique over the lp-Cepstral Speech Space.- Nonlinear Speech Features for the Objective Detection of Discontinuities in Concatenative Speech Synthesis.- Signal Sparsity Enhancement Through Wavelet Transforms in Underdetermined BSS.- A Quantitative Evaluation of a Bio-inspired Sound Segregation Technique for Two- and Three-Source Mixtures.- Application of Symbolic Machine Learning to Audio Signal Segmentation.- Analysis of an Infant Cry Recognizer for the Early Identification of Pathologies.- Graphical Models for Text-Independent Speaker Verification.- An Application to Acquire Audio Signals with ChicoPlus Hardware.- Speech Identity Conversion.- Robust Speech Enhancement Based on NPHMM Under Unknown Noise.