Evaluation of the acoustic and aerodynamic constraints of a pneumotachograph for speech and voice studies

International audienceTo measure oral and nasal airflow during speech production, several conditions must be gathered. In this aim, we designed and built a pneumotachograph with particular care to optimise its response time, linearity and acoustical response. This flow meter is based on the grid flow meter principle with a small dead volume and specific linearization for the inhaled and exhaled airflow. A soft silicone rubber mask, pressed against the speaker's face prevents air leakage, without hindering articulatory movements. The acoustical distortions of the speech sound through the device are remedied by an adapted signal processing from its transfer function

Two Sides of the Same Coin? Investigating Iambic and Trochaic Timing and Prominence in German Poetry.

Wagner P. Two Sides of the Same Coin? Investigating Iambic and Trochaic Timing and Prominence in German Poetry. In: Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2010. 2010: P1.47.This paper examines the acoustic and perceptual properties of iambic vs. trochaic meter in a large corpus of read German poetry. Psychoacoustic evidence of metrical grouping is not straightforwardly applicable to speech, due to the complex interaction of the involved acoustic parameters in prominence expression. It is possible that grouping effects in (poetic) speech are merely an artifact of listeners’ expectations based on rhythmic alternations previously heard. Empirical findings show small but significant duration differences between iambic and trochaic feet. Furthermore, it was found that stressed and unstressed syllables are produced with a stable phase relationship of 3:2, independent of meter. Experience in poetry reading plays a role in production style. On the level of prosodic prominence, only subtle differences can be traced. Our findings do not provide convincing evidence for meter specific prosodic shapes and are compatible with an affordance based dynamic view of rhythmic structure. Index Terms: grouping, rhythm, prominence, mete

Does Training Enhance Entraining? Musical Ability and Neural Signatures of Beat Perception

Perception of beat and meter is a nearly universal human skill that requires little to no conscious effort. However, the extent to which music training influences this perception in the brain remains unknown. Music performance requires high sensitivity to timing and physical entrainment to external auditory stimuli. Additionally, compared to untrained individuals, musicians show higher performance on a number of auditory and speech tasks, as well as different brain morphology and fiber connections. Beat and meter perception are thought to be subtended by oscillations of groups of neurons at corresponding frequencies. Here, electroencephalography (EEG) was used to examine the magnitude of neuronal entrainment to beat and meter in individuals with high or low levels of music training. EEG signals were recorded while participants attended to a musical beat, and then imagined a binary or ternary meter over that beat. Beat-keeping ability was also assessed using a synchronous tapping task. A strong EEG signal was observed selectively at beat and meter frequencies, indicating entrainment across participants. No differences in the magnitude of entrainment were observed based on level of music training or beat-keeping ability. These results suggest that music training may not influence beat and meter perception at the level of neural networks and that entrainment could be innate. Broadly, results provide a foundation for further research into whether entrainment has evolutionary significance

Neural NILM: Deep Neural Networks Applied to Energy Disaggregation

Energy disaggregation estimates appliance-by-appliance electricity consumption from a single meter that measures the whole home's electricity demand. Recently, deep neural networks have driven remarkable improvements in classification performance in neighbouring machine learning fields such as image classification and automatic speech recognition. In this paper, we adapt three deep neural network architectures to energy disaggregation: 1) a form of recurrent neural network called `long short-term memory' (LSTM); 2) denoising autoencoders; and 3) a network which regresses the start time, end time and average power demand of each appliance activation. We use seven metrics to test the performance of these algorithms on real aggregate power data from five appliances. Tests are performed against a house not seen during training and against houses seen during training. We find that all three neural nets achieve better F1 scores (averaged over all five appliances) than either combinatorial optimisation or factorial hidden Markov models and that our neural net algorithms generalise well to an unseen house.Comment: To appear in ACM BuildSys'15, November 4--5, 2015, Seou

Co-integration of acoustic simulation software and GIS for speech intelligibility analysis in complex multi-source acoustic environments. Application to Toledo's Cathedral

The speech intelligibility in complex multi-source acoustic environments depends on a variety of factors such as speech level, background noise level, reverberation time, as well as psychoacoustic effects. Since these factors can change for each source-receiver combination, in order to integrate information from various sources, efficient tools and techniques are required to determine the speech intelligibility at every listener position. In drawing up this study, two types of tools are used: (i) an acoustic simulation software (ODEON) and (ii) spatial analysis tools of a Geographic Information System (ArcGIS). To determine the speech intelligibility, the Speech Transmission Index (STI) has been calculated. Sound Pressure Level and Reverberation Time have been calculated at points of a grid at intervals of 1 meter. An automated workflow using ArcGis Modelbuilder has been created in order to obtain STI. Also, Arcmap has been used to represent and analyze the results over the complex geometry of the space. The proposed procedure has been calibrated using information obtained in the Toledo Cathedral (Spain) and the results for acoustic situations related to different celebrations of the liturgy are presented

Computer assisted audiometric evaluation system

A computer-based audiometric evaluation system has been developed. The system makes use of an IBM PC/XT/AT compatible personal computer to perform pure tone and speech tests and · comprises a plug-in card and custom software. The card contains pure tone and masking noise generators, together with amplifiers for a. set of headphones .and bone conduction transducer, patient and audiologist microphone amplifiers and a hand-held infra-red remote-control unit. A voice-operated gain-adjusting device on the audiologist's microphone eliminates the need for a sound pressure level meter during speech tests. The software-based user-interface makes use.of overlaid pop-up menus, context sensitive assistance.and a text editor on a graphics screen. Pure tone and speech data are acquired and displayed on a dynamic audiogram and speech discrimination gram respectively. This data may be stored and later retrieved from a patient data base. Further audiometric tests may be incorporated at a later stage

A Dynamic Approach to Rhythm in Language: Toward a Temporal Phonology

It is proposed that the theory of dynamical systems offers appropriate tools to model many phonological aspects of both speech production and perception. A dynamic account of speech rhythm is shown to be useful for description of both Japanese mora timing and English timing in a phrase repetition task. This orientation contrasts fundamentally with the more familiar symbolic approach to phonology, in which time is modeled only with sequentially arrayed symbols. It is proposed that an adaptive oscillator offers a useful model for perceptual entrainment (or `locking in') to the temporal patterns of speech production. This helps to explain why speech is often perceived to be more regular than experimental measurements seem to justify. Because dynamic models deal with real time, they also help us understand how languages can differ in their temporal detail---contributing to foreign accents, for example. The fact that languages differ greatly in their temporal detail suggests that these effects are not mere motor universals, but that dynamical models are intrinsic components of the phonological characterization of language.Comment: 31 pages; compressed, uuencoded Postscrip

Music and Language Development: Traits of Nursery Rhymes and Their Impact on Children\u27s Language Development

From birth--possibly even before birth--the amount and array of external stimuli profoundly affect a child’s cognitive and linguistic development. In addition to verbal communication from parent to child, singing proves to be an integral aid to a child’s development of speech and language, allegedly due to repetitions of words and rhythms. Nursery rhymes are, from infancy, among the most commonly presented forms of musical stimulus for children. The repetitive nature of the nursery rhymes undoubtedly supports language and speech development, but various characteristics of nursery rhymes, specifically pitch interval, meter, phrase length, contour, and harmony, also contribute substantially to the development of language in children