Introduction to Speech Science and Technology
Instructors: Anna Sfakianaki & Yannis Stylianou
This course focuses on the qualitative characteristics of speech and of speech databases. The aim is to acquaint Computer Science students with Voice and Speech in a broader sense and induct them into Speech Science.
Speech Science is the experimental study of speech communication, examining speech production and perception as well as speech signal analysis and processing. It originates from Phonetics, the branch of Linguistics that studies speech sounds, but utilizes empirical methods and techniques adopted from other sciences, such as physics, physiology, psychology, in order to define the physical and physiological dimensions of speech sounds as well as their perceptual characteristics. This additional information on speech sounds can be used in Speech Technology, e.g., synthetic speech, speech recognition, text-to-speech applications, etc.
The course is an introduction to the basics of acoustic and auditory phonetics and to the study of speech production and perception with experimental techniques, such as recording, spectrographic analysis, electroglottography, stroboscopy, etc. We will address issues relating to articulation, hearing, production and perception of speech, as well as recording, analysis and annotation of speech data.
The course is offered to Computer Science students as well as to students of Linguistics/Philology, Medicine, Physics, Education and other departments, wishing to acqaint themselves with the mechanism of human speech and hearing. Interdisciplinary cooperation among students from different departments and educational backgrounds is particularly encouraged.
Course content
- Speech Science: Scope and technological applications
- Speech production: Articulation and acoustics
- Voice: Anatomy and phonation types
- Audio signals and recording
- Acoustics of vowels
- Acoustics of consonants
- Speech databases and annotation techniques
- Hearing
- Speech Perception
- Connected speech and Coarticulation
- Acoustics of Prosody
- Style and Emotion in Speech
- Experimental methods of voice, speech and articulation recording and analysis
- Διδάσκων: Ιωάννης Στυλιανού
- Διδάσκων: Άννα Σφακιανάκη