Engineers who study electronics and communications technology are frequently confronted with algorithms and techniques concerning speech signals. We have prepared the study course, which covers fundamentals of phonetics and speech processing. In the first lectures, students learn the basics of speech communication. Auditory and articulation models are described. The next theme is devoted to the speech processing techniques. Typical parameters of the signal are introduced. The principles of text to speech synthesis are presented in the third part of course. Finally, automatic speech recognition and its algorithms are studied in the last part of course.
The experimental works, which follow the lectures, will be presented in the contribution. Experiments are made in Matlab. We have worked out the set of M-files, which guides the student through the main topics of lectures. All M-files are prepared as simple and open programs. Students can change constants and modify the calculations. The results are visualised and in proper cases demonstrated by audio output.
Until now, the set of M-files covers following topics:
Quantization, quantization noise, nonlinear quantizers, DPCM, sigma-delta quantizer
Predictive quantizer, short term parameters (LPC)
Short term spectra, FFT, LPC, cepstra
Formant structure of phones, voiced vs. unvoiced, pitch period
Spectral distance measure, DTW algorithms
Selected examples will be presented in the contribution.