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Analysis of institutional authors

Luque, JordiAuthor

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June 9, 2019
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Article

Scaling and universality in the human voice

Publicated to: Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 12 (105): 20141344- - 2015-04-06 12(105), DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2014.1344

Authors:

Luque, J; Luque, B; Lacasa, L
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Affiliations

Queen Mary Univ London, Sch Math Sci, London E1 4NS, England - Author
Telefon Res, Barcelona, Spain - Author
Univ Politecn Madrid, EIAE, Dept Matemat Aplicada & Estadist, Madrid, Spain - Author
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Abstract

Speech is a distinctive complex feature of human capabilities. In order to understand the physics underlying speech production, in this work, we empirically analyse the statistics of large human speech datasets ranging several languages. We first show that during speech, the energy is unevenly released and power-law distributed, reporting a universal robust Gutenberg-Richter-like law in speech. We further show that such 'earthquakes in speech' show temporal correlations, as the interevent statistics are again power-law distributed. As this feature takes place in the intraphoneme range, we conjecture that the process responsible for this complex phenomenon is not cognitive, but it resides in the physiological (mechanical) mechanisms of speech production. Moreover, we show that thesewaiting time distributions are scale invariant under a renormalization group transformation, suggesting that the process of speech generation is indeed operating close to a critical point. These results are put in contrast with current paradigms in speech processing, which point towards low dimensional deterministic chaos as the origin of nonlinear traits in speech fluctuations. As these latter fluctuations are indeed the aspects that humanize synthetic speech, these findings may have an impact in future speech synthesis technologies. Results are robust and independent of the communication language or the number of speakers, pointing towards a universal pattern and yet another hint of complexity in human speech.
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Keywords

criticalityscalingBiophysicsCriticalityDistributionsEarthquakesHumansLanguageLawModels, theoreticalScalingSignalsSpeechSpeech production measurementSpeech recognitionTime factorsVoice

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Journal of the Royal Society Interface due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency WoS (JCR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2015, it was in position 9/62, thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Multidisciplinary Sciences.

Independientemente del impacto esperado determinado por el canal de difusión, es importante destacar el impacto real observado de la propia aportación.

Según las diferentes agencias de indexación, el número de citas acumuladas por esta publicación hasta la fecha 2026-04-25:

  • WoS: 14
  • Scopus: 15
  • Europe PMC: 7
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Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2026-04-25:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 24.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 24 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 8.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 13 (Altmetric).

It is essential to present evidence supporting full alignment with institutional principles and guidelines on Open Science and the Conservation and Dissemination of Intellectual Heritage. A clear example of this is:

  • The work has been submitted to a journal whose editorial policy allows open Open Access publication.
  • Assignment of a Handle/URN as an identifier within the deposit in the Institutional Repository: https://oa.upm.es/44558/

As a result of the publication of the work in the institutional repository, statistical usage data has been obtained that reflects its impact. In terms of dissemination, we can state that, as of

  • Views: 1,368
  • Downloads: 241
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Leadership analysis of institutional authors

This work has been carried out with international collaboration, specifically with researchers from: United Kingdom.

There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author (LUQUE SERRANO, BARTOLOME) .

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Awards linked to the item

B.L. acknowledges funding from Spanish Education Council under project FIS2013-41057-P.
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