Lab

Analysing speech articulations

This is your first PHON lab! This lab will give a quick introduction to Praat phonetics software. We’ll then explore speech articulations via visualisations in Praat and your own practice!

Labs will start in week 2 and will be held in Appleton Tower room 4.02 (the PPLS computing lab).  You should be assigned to one of the Wed 9-11am or 4-6pm labs.

You can find the lab materials for module 1 here: phon_lab_1

Remember, the labs for each module are in the week following the lecture. So, this week 2 lab will focus on module 1 material.  Try to watch the videos and go through the readings before the lab (as well as looking at the lab instructions!).

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 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):

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 Answers and Commentary