Using tools for investigating speech signals is an invaluable help to teach phonetics and more generally speech sciences. For several years we have undertaken the development of the software Snorri which is for both speech scientists as a research tool and lecturers in phonetics as an illustration tool.
Unlike other softwares dedicated to signal processing, Snorri is intended specifically to speech. It consists of five types of tools:
to edit speech signals (e.g. to create stimuli for perception experiments). The spectrogram is recomputed after each command (cut, paste, filtering, damping) so that the acoustic consequences can be easily evaluated. to annotate phonetically or orthographically speech signals. The set of phonetic symbols is fully parametrised so that it is possible to annotate any language. Snorri offers tools to explore annotated corpora automatically. to analyse speech with a large set of spectral analyses and monitor spectral peaks along time. to study prosody. Besides pitch calculation it is possible to synthesise new signals by modifying the F0 curve and/or the speech rate. to generate parameters for Klatts synthesiser (e.g. to accurately control which are the acoustic cues introduced in a speech signal). A user friendly graphic interface and copy synthesis tools allows the user to generate files for Klatts synthesiser easily.
In the context of speech sciences Snorri can therefore be exploited for many purposes, among them, investigating acoustic cues of speech sounds and prosody in order to evaluate their perceptive importance.