Reading
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 9.3 – Feature Extraction: MFCCs
Mel-frequency Cepstral Co-efficients are a widely-used feature with HMM acoustic models. They are a classic example of feature engineering: manipulating the extracted features to suit the properties and limitations of the statistical model.
Wayland (Phonetics) – Chapter 9 – Hearing
Introduces basic concepts in human hearing - it may be useful to read the bits on decibels/loudness and the Mel and Bark scales.
Holmes & Holmes – Chapter 10 – Front-end analysis for ASR
Covers filterbank, MFCC features. The material on linear prediction is out of scope.
Taylor – Section 12.3 – The cepstrum
By using the logarithm to convert a multiplication into a sum, the cepstrum separates the source and filter components of speech.