Speech Acoustics

Learning Outcomes

The aim of this unit is to familiarize you with the acoustic cues that are present in the speech signal and to get you to think about how these cues are affected by different aspects such as hearing loss, poor room acoustics, degradation of the signal etc.

On successful completion of this topic you will be able to:

Give a basic description of the source-filter model of speech production.
Have a basic understanding of how a spectrogram can be used to show the changes in speech sounds through time.
Identify which speech sounds are identified by different frequency cues.
Understand how and why some speech sounds are affected more than others in different situations.
Identify which speech sound are most likely to be affected by different degrees of hearing loss.

Preknowledge

This material is intended to be introductory material and as such should not require indepth knowledge of background material although some understanding of aspects of sound such as amplitude, frequency and decibels would help.

Reading

There are many books that give a description of the different acoustic cues that represent different speech sounds.

One particularly good book is:

Raphael, L.J., Borden, G.J. and Harris, K.S. (2012) Speech Science Primer - Physiology, Acoustics and Perception of Speech. 6th Ed. Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.

While the 6th edition has recently come out, the fifth edition would suffice in its coverage of this material. The most relavant chapter is chapter "10 - The Acoustic Cues", but chapters 6 and 7 cover the production of speech sounds in some detail.