A Phonetic Study of 'Sasang Constitution'

음성학적으로 본 사상체질

Sasang Constitution, one branch of oriental medicine, claims that people can be classified into four different 'constitutions:' Taeyang, Taeum, Soyang, and Soeum. This study investigates whether the classification of the 'constitutions' could be accurately made solely based on people's voice by analyzing the data from 46 different voices whose constitutions were already determined. Seven source-related parameters and four filter-related parameters were phonetically analyzed and the GMM(gaussian mixture model) was tried with the data. Both the results from phonetic analyses and GMM showed that all the parameters (except one)failed to distinguish the constitutions of the people successfully. And even the single exception, the bandwidth of F2, did not provide us with sufficient reasons to be the source of distinction. This result seems to suggest one of the two conclusions: either the Sasang Constitutions cannot be substantiated with phonetic characteristics of peoples' voices with reliable accuracy, or we need to find yet some other parameters which haven't been conventionally proposed.