[Simon King]

Glad it’s sorted. In general, we recommend not to store any valuable files inside the VM, but rather on your host computer.

[Simon King]

It’s probably best not to do any software updates. If you broke it, then you could delete the whole virtual machine and download a fresh copy.

[Simon King]

See this topic

[Simon King]

You don’t need to export PATH if you set it in your .bashrc, just use the command in Module 3 Tutorial B.

Perhaps you have added spaces around the “=” sign?

[Simon King]

This means that you have not performed synthesis for that Utterance object. Perhaps you only set the text but didn’t complete the rest of the pipeline? A Wave relation only exists in an Utterance object if the waveform generation step has been run (e.g., SayText runs all steps including that one)

[Simon King]

No, you have to find mistakes: instances where the output speech is incorrect. Festival’s POS tagger is really old and not particularly good, so you will find mistakes. You might need to craft sentences in order to do this. Think about ambiguity!

[Simon King]

It looks like students who enrolled slightly later on the course didn’t have their access enabled. Computing support are fixing this now…

Update: now fixed. Everyone should be able to rsync.

[Simon King]

This issue with sound playback occurs in some VM installations, and can usually be solved like this.

[Simon King]

You don’t need to use sudo to edit that file – it’s in your file space, so you can edit it as yourself.

You should add the PATH line at the end of the file, as per the instructions, not the start.

Don’t type the “$” before commands – this is used in the instructions to indicate the bash prompt (to differentiate from the Festival prompt).

[Simon King]

You are running the wrong version of Festival (an old version that is also installed in the VM). You need to set your PATH as described in the instructions for Module 3 Tutorial B, to pick up the correct version.

[Simon King]

That means you are not connected to the VPN. Have you installed the VPN client (Forticlient) and used it to connect to the VPN?

[Simon King]

OK – good – you can reach the machine. That’s possible without the VPN, but logging in to it requires the VPN.

To test if you are on the VPN, use a browser (try this on both your host computer and in the VM) and type “What’s my IP” into Google. You are looking for an IP address starting with one of these:

129.215
192.41

or maybe one of these

192.107
192.82
193.62
193.63
194.80
194.81

[Simon King]

Make sure your host computer is connected to the VPN. Then, in the VM, try these and report your results back here:

$ nslookup scp1.ppls.ed.ac.uk
$ ping scp1.ppls.ed.ac.uk
$ ping 129.215.204.88

[Simon King]

A very interesting topic. I’m not going to answer this now, but ask you to ask this question again in Module 7, when we will use knowledge of human hearing to motivate feature extraction for Automatic Speech Recognition.

[Simon King]

A simplified description of the vocal folds is that they are closed most of the time. The air pressure from the lungs eventually forces them to burst open and release the pressure, after which they snap shut very rapidly.

This is not random motion, but a very particular pattern of opening and closing.

The signal generated by one cycle of the vocal folds (mainly related to the very rapid closing) can be approximated as an impulse.

Hence, the acoustic wave generated at the glottis is approximately an impulse train. So, we use an impulse train as a model of this signal, and our model has just one parameter: F0.

In the literature on phonation you will of course find much more sophisticated descriptions and models than this. The glottal wave is not exactly an impulse train, but has a particular shape which can be parameterised – e.g., the Liljencrantz-Fant (LF) model has 4 parameters. This is beyond the scope of Speech Processing.

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