Jurafsky & Martin – Chapter 2 – Regular Expressions and Automata

An important technique used widely in NLP. In TTS, it can be applied to tasks such as detecting and expanding non-standard words.

Holmes & Holmes – Chapter 5 – Message synthesis from stored human speech components

Pitch-synchronous overlap-and-add (PSOLA) remains a key technique in speech signal processing.

Handbook of phonetic sciences – Ch 20 – Intro to Signal Processing for Speech

Written for a non-technical audience, this gently introduces some key concepts in speech signal processing.

Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 8 – Resonances of the vocal tract

A more detailed look at how resonance occurs in the vocal tract, and how that can be used to explain the sound quality (e.g. formant frequencies) of vowel sounds.

Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 7 – The production of speech

Some phonetics at last, and a first encounter with the source-filter model of speech.

Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 6 – Hearing

Some understanding of human hearing will be helpful for engineering suitable features to extract from the waveform for automatic speech recognition.

Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 5 – Resonance

Now we turn to speech production, and resonance is how the vocal tract shapes the quality of sound, to produce different vowels, for example.

Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 4 – Wave analysis

The waveform is rarely the best representation for analysis of sound, and this is an intuitive introduction to why.

Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 3 – Quality

A general term for aspects of sound other than loudness and pitch. Different vowels, for example, have a different quality of sound.

Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 2 – Loudness and pitch

These are perceptual phenomena that relate to physical properties of sound.

Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 1 – Sound waves

Very brief, but a reasonable place to start if you have no idea what sound is.