Speech and Hearing Institute News

New web applications for Speech science and Phonetics

Learn about speech science and phonetics on line with these new tools that run in the browser:

• RETONE: manipulate pitch contour. Record some speech and listen to what happens when you adjust its pitch contour.
• ESECTION: speech spectral cross-sections. Record some speech and display spectral cross-sections at some time or over some interval. Displays filterbank, spectra, and autocorrelation functions. Allows measurement of formant frequencies and fundamental frequency.
• VQLAB: voice quality laboratory. Record some speech and make measurements of voice quality and pitch. Suitable for measurements like jitter and shimmer for single vowels or for plotting fundamental frequency distributions of long passages.
• VTDEMO: vocal tract synthesizer. Generate speech sounds from a model vocal tract. See and hear the effects of changing the shape of the vocal tract.

New: a complete list of web-based tools on speechandhearing.net

WASP now on the web!

The WASP program (Waveform, Annotations, Spectrogram and Pitch) is a popular Windows program from UCL. A web version of WASP is now available with much the same functionality. This is what it looks like:

Web applications for teaching Speech Science

Some Windows applications designed for teaching Phonetics and Speech Science have now been converted to run in the browser:

• RoboVoice: a tool for creating new utterances by cutting and pasting together excerpts from recordings. Used to demonstrate how speech sounds change in form depending upon their context. You can't just cut out a syllable or word from one place and paste it into another, you have to think about coarticulation, stress, pitch and timing.
• Pitch Laboratory: a tool for experimenting with the pitch of sounds. You can record a single note, or a speech sound or a sentence and make measurements of pitch. Use it to look at the fundamental frequency of common sounds or a note from a musical instrument. You can also change the pitch of a recording by playing it back slower or faster. You can generate periodic sounds by combining pure tones to create beats.

Ripple tank demonstration

A new animated ripple tank demonstration in Javascript. Demonstrates propagation of wave motion in two-dimensions. Includes slit obstacles and target shapes.

New & updated web tools for speech analysis & display

New and revised tools that analyze speech in your browser:

• AmPitch - Amplitude and Pitch display
• HarSyn - Harmonic Analysis and Synthesis
• RTSpect - Real-Time Spectrum
• RTWave - Real-Time Waveform
• RTGram - Real-Time Spectrogram
• WASP - Waveform Spectrogram & Pitch

See how these may be embedded in a web presentation for lectures or talks.

Web demonstrations of Bayesian statistics

Bayesian data analysis demos show how Bayesian sampling methods can be used to estimate the parameters of a statistical model of some data. The demonstrations show how Bayesian methods can be used for statistical inference from data as an alternative to conventional methods such as t-tests and regression.

New real-time amplitude & pitch display

AmPitch is a new real-time scrolling pitch analyzer implemented in JavaScript. It displays both pitch and amplitude and is configurable for different voices.

Web version of WASP

The windows program WASP has proven very popular for recording and displaying speech as a waveform, spectrogram and pitch track. A new web version of WASP is now available. This has the essential functionality of the Windows application, including recording live audio, saving audio, loading audio and display with zoom and replay.

 

Web Audio Demonstrations

The ESystem program has been very popular for learning about the nature of signals and systems, but up till now it has only been available as a Windows application. This has meant it has not been usable on Macs, tablets or phones. However there is a new web standard for processing audio inside web pages, and this means it becomes possible to build web applications that capture, analyse, generate and display signals. Now a prototype web audio version of ESystem is available! Do try it out and give us your feedback.

NEW: also look out for a prototype web audio version of ESynth, the program for exploring harmonic synthesis.

NEW: also look out for a prototype web audio version of ESection, the program for display spectral cross-sections.

Unicode Phonetic Keyboard

The UCL Unicode Phonetic Keyboard is the highest rated installable keyboard for the input of phonetic transcription. It adds an alternative keyboard to Windows to aid the input of phonetic characters from a unicode font.