Lectures
Lectures will be in-person this year and recordings will be done through the University system (Media Hopper/echo365). We may also use some polling software in class, e.g. wooclap.
Labs
From week 2 onwards you will have a timetabled 2 hour lab where you can work through exercises that will consolidate your understanding of the materials from the preceding week. The different modules have different software requirements which are listed below. Once you have an account on speech.zone, you can use the technical support forums to get help.
Phon labs: Praat
The first few labs will focus on phonetics using Praat. You can download Praat onto your own computer: it should work for MacOS, Windows and Linux.
Signals labs: Jupyter Notebooks
The signal processing labs will use Jupyter notebooks: a combination of Python code and notes that you access using a web browser. Don’t worry if you don’t know any Python – this is not a formal requirement of the course, and you’ll learn what you need simply by doing the exercises. You can run the notebooks on your personal computer or on the Edina Notable service (direct login here)
More details for getting setup with these can be found in the Module 3 materials.
Please note, while the notebooks use Python, the material there is to support your learning, not to test your ability to code! Nothing related to the code specifically is directly assessed (though the concepts in the notebooks marked essential maybe). You don’t need to know Python to do this course, though MSc SLP students will need to know Python for many other courses so getting a more bit of practice/exposure definitely doesn’t hurt!
TTS and ASR labs/assignments: PPLS AT lab linux machines/Remote Desktop
The TTS and ASR labs will be focused on the TTS and ASR assignments, respectively. The TTS assignment uses the Festival Speech Synthesis System, while the ASR assignment uses HTK and an assortment of Bash (unix) shell scripts. So, for this part of the course you will need to use a unix command line interface, i.e. the shell.
This year students will have access to the PPLS AT labs, physically and through the remote desktop service.
You can potentially install Festival and HTK onto your own computer, but if your internet connection is good, it may be easier to use the Remote Desktop service (or just go to the lab). This basically allows you to use the computers in the Appleton tower PPLS computer lab from your own computer.
Setup Remote Desktop access to the PPLS Computer Lab
Note: We aim to have access setup by end of week 1
- Download and install the RealVNC Viewer software on your machine
- After downloading, you’ll see a message asking you to make a paid account to register etc – you can ignore this! You don’t need an account to use VNC Viewer.
- Ensure you are first connected to a University VPN
- Go to https://resource.ppls.ed.ac.uk/whoson/atlab.php and follow the instructions at the bottom of that page to connect to the remote desktop
- If you run into any issues with messages saying the VNC subscription has expired, let the course organizer know.
- Log in with your normal school/EASE log in details. If you find your normal EASE log in details do not work, then you will need to ask to have your account activated for the PPLS Lab machines. Mail is.helpline@ed.ac.uk to request this (e.g. “please can you enable my account to log in to the PPLS Computer Lab machines, my UUN is sXXXXXXX…”).
- Make sure you log out and disconnect properly once you have finished, otherwise you may tie the machine up and prevent others from using it!
When you become comfortable using Unix style command line interfaces, you may want to use the ssh command connect directly into these servers. It’s a good skill to have and takes up a lot less computing power than running the remote desktop. If you want to try this, you can follow the instructions on remote working here.
For Linux and MacOS users, this means the Terminal app that already exists on your computer (or equivalent). For Windows users, you can (probably) use the ssh command from the windows commandline. Otherwise, you can use a terminal emulator, e.g. Windows Powershell or Ubuntu WSL. You can also use an ssh client – the classic one of these for Windows is PuTTY. You might notice that pretty much all of the staff use MacOS or Linux – once you get into programming a bit you’ll understand why!
The online LinkedIn Learning course “Learning Linux Command Line” (free with your University login) also gives some instructions on setting up a linux-style environment on different operating systems (e.g. MacOs, Windows).
If you’re an experienced Linux user, you can try to install Festival and HTK locally. You may be able to find some hints already on the speech zone forums if you wish to attempt this. You can also ask us for help! If you do this, you will still need to access the PPLS servers to download the data and scripts used in the assignments.
If none of these solutions work for you, please get in touch and we will work something else out!