Module 1 – basics – speech signals

THE SECTION WILL BE UPDATED SHORTLY FOR 2021 – don’t follow the steps here yet!

Here are some suggested checks on computing software/skills you’ll need for the course.

Task 1 : the Linux command line

Do the exercises in the LinkedIn Learning course “Learning Linux Command Line” (free with your University login). Skip Section 1 (Setting Up Your Environment) and follow Sections 2 and 3. The total amount of video to watch (including the optional introduction) is about 50 minutes. To do this you’ll need to be able to access a unix like shell. You can try using the remote desktop or try setting up a terminal on your own computer (e.g. the terminal app in Linux or MacOS, or a terminal emulator like Git Bash or Cygwin in Windows).

Task 2 : Praat

Using your personal computer:

1. Follow the phon/phon-0-getPraat Jupyter Notebook
2. Use Praat to record yourself saying a short sentence, then plot the waveform and spectrogram of it.

Task 3: testing Festival and HTK

We’ll be learning these tools properly in due course. For now, let’s just confirm they are working. Remember that commands, like most things in Linux, are case-sensitive. Do the following using the remote desktop:

Festival

1. Open a terminal and type ‘festival’
2. At the festival prompt, type ‘(SayText “Hello world.”) and hit Enter
3. Confirm that you hear some speech (it won’t be very good, because we’re using a default voice)
4. Type ‘(quit)’ and hit Enter to exit Festival

HTK

1. Open a terminal and type ‘HVite’
2. Confirm that you see the usage instruction that start ‘USAGE: HVite [options] VocabFile HMMList DataFiles…’

Since this is the first module, here’s a reminder that the readings in each module are categorised as

• Essential (read all of these now, and complete them before attempting any exercises or attending the tutorial)
• Recommended (read as many as possible now, but you can catch up on the remainder when you have spare time)
• Extra (only read if you’re interested; some readings may be challenging; most are beyond the scope of the course)