Course Description:

The goal of the course is to give the student basic knowledge from several fields that is necessary in order to pursue research in automatic speech processing. The course will begin with a study of the acoustic content of the speech signal. The students will use the spectrographic display to examine the signal and discover its variable properties. Phones in increasingly larger contexts will be studied with the goal of understanding coarticulation. Phonological rules will be studied as a contextual aid in understanding the spectrographic display.

The spectrogram will then serve as a first introduction to the basic elements of prosody. Other displays will then be used to study the three parts of prosody: amplitude, duration, and pitch. Building on these three elements, the student will then examine how the three interact in careful and spontaneous speech.

Next, the students will explore perception. Topics covered will be:

The second part of this course will cover all aspects of speech synthesis.

The whole synthesis process will be covered from both a theoretical and practical viewpoint. Subsections of the course will cover:

Each section will describe the problems abstractly and cover what are considered current solutions with their advantages and disadvantages highlighted. Practical exercises cast within the Festival Speech Synthesis System framework will be set, to give experience in solving actual synthesis problems.

Students need only have a basic knoweldge of speech and language processing. Some degree of programming and statistical modelling will be beneficial, but not required.

Course notes:

Grading: