Lab

Module 1 labs (to be held in week 2, 2023-24) are cancelled due to the UCU strike.

Exploring Speech Acoustics

This is your first PHON lab! This lab will use Praat to explore speech acoustics through visualisations.

Follow the links to find:

• The lab instructions – including how to install Praat
• Sound file 1: speechproc_phonlab1_2.wav
• Sound file 2: speechproc_phonlab1_2.wav
• The audio says: “Take a picture. It’ll last longer”.

Remember, the labs for each module are in the week following the lecture. So, this module’s lab will be on Wednesday in week 2 (there’s no lab in week 1).

Maths refresher

If you’re already quite familiar with Praat and phonetics, but not so much with maths, now might be a good time to check out some of Sharon Goldwater’s maths tutorials here:
https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/sgwater/math_tutorials.html

If you’re looking for some a more comprehensive textbook that goes back to basics, you might find Foundation Maths by Croft and Davidson helpful (available through the University of Edinburgh library).

For the signal processing bit of the course (coming up next), you might also want to brush up on some trigonometry and vectors (the trig stuff is mostly relevant for the signal processing modules, the vectors/linear algebra is relevant to machine learning more generally):

• a great intro to vectors/linear algebra
• a quick trig refresher
• a nice video on radians

There’s more maths prep resources here: https://speech.zone/courses/prepare-for-study-in-speech-and-language-processing/brush-up-your-mathematics/

Or you could just get ahead with the assigned reading!

Lab Commentary

This lab was about exploring speech representations in Praat, so the “solutions” are more of a commentary.

Rebekka’s video commentary for the Module 1 lab