My favourite way of understanding how the Viterbi algorithm is applied to HMMs. Can also be helpful in understanding search for unit selection speech synthesis.
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.
Wayland (Phonetics) – Chapter 5 – Phonemic and Morphophonemic Analysis
An introduction to the concept of phonemes, allophones and some common phonological alternations.
Vaux & Samuels – Explaining vowel systems: dispersion theory vs natural selection
Cross-linguistic distribution of vowel systems
Turk et al. – Acoustic Segment Durations in Prosodic Research: A Practical Guide
A guide to segmenting speech using acoustic features (i.e., spectrograms)
Taylor – Chapter 8 – Pronunciation
Including how the lexicon is stored, letter-to-sound, and compressing the lexicon.
Taylor – Chapter 3 – The text-to-speech problem
Discusses the differences between spoken and written forms of language, and describes the structure of a typical TTS system.
Tanner et al. – Multidimensional acoustic variation in vowels across English dialects
Looks at acoustics characteristics of vowels across many dialects of English.
Sharon Goldwater: Vectors and their uses
A nice, self-contained introduction to vectors and why they are a useful mathematical concept. You should consider this reading ESSENTIAL if you haven’t studied vectors before (or it’s been a while).
Sharon Goldwater: Basic probability theory
An essential primer on this topic. You should consider this reading ESSENTIAL if you haven’t studied probability before or it’s been a while. We’re adding this the readings in Module 7 to give you some time to look at it before we really need it in Module 9 – mostly we need the concepts of conditional probability and conditional independence.
Seeing Speech
Interactive IPA chart
Schaedler – Seeing Circles, Sines and Signals
A very nice concise primer on the basic components of digital signal processing with great visual demonstrations.
This is the new version. Still under construction.