Speech tools

1
Speech tools

• Jean-Philippe Goldman
• 03.03.2004

2
Two questions

• What kind of data ?
• Which task ?

3
What kind of data ?

• Speech content (noise, multivoice,)
• Data File
• Sound/Transcription/PitchCurve
• Sampling/Quantization
• 16k 12k 8k 4k 8bit
• Size 16k16bit,256kbps ? 1.9Mo/mn ? 115Mo/h
• Format
• Sound wav, wma, mp3, ogg, aiff, aifc, au, vox,
  raw, sd, CSL, Ogg/Vorbis, NIST/Sphere
• Transcription HTK, TIMIT, TextGrid, Phondat
• Number of files

4
Which task ?

• Visualization and Edition
• Record, Play, edit, mix, add effects
• Analysis
• spectral, pitch
• Speech manipulation
• Filtering, mixing, adding effects, prosodic
  manipulation
• Annotation
• segmentation, labeling
• Scripting
• Batch, communication with outside
• Plotting

5
Examples of tasks

• build stimuli for an experiment (i.e.
  cross-splicing)
• manage a speech database for a TTS engine
• create a prosodic database
• analyze speech corpus from experiment recordings
• verify/correct an automatic segmentation

6
Two questions

• What kind of data ?
• Which task ?

Two rules

• there is no unique tool to do everything
• there are plenty of ways to do one thing

7
Tool features

• Visualization/Edition
• Analysis
• Speech manipulation
• Annotation
• Scripting
• Plotting

• Supported format
• Platform/installation
• Evolution/community
• Accessibility
• Price

8
Softwares

• Goldwave (audio editor)
• Esps Xwaves (routines visual.)
• Praat (speech analysis)
• Wavesurfer (speech editor)
• Transcriber (annotation tool)
• Matlab (general purpose soft)
• OGI speech tools (routines app. dev.)
• winpitch, pitchworks, phonedit, cooledit..

9
Goldwave

• self-defined as top rated, professional digital
  audio editor

10
Goldwave

• pros edition (good gestion of memory for big
  files), many FX, noise reduction, real-time
  spectrum and VU meters, various formats, batch
  conversion, chain effects, easy interface
• cons nothing for speech (pitch, formant),
  windows only, no scripting
• Good for file edition not for speech

11
(No Transcript)
12
Esps - Waves

• Developed by Entropic ATT. Now public
• Comp.speech FAQ says
• Esps comprehensive set of speech
  analysis/processing tools
• Waves is a graphical front-end for speech
  processing (waveforms, spectrograms, pitch)
  includes a signal labeling utility

13
(No Transcript)
14
Esps waves

• pros powerful, designed for big files,
• cons UNIX only (free BSD), not standard formats,
  requires programming skills, development has
  stopped

15
Praat

• Developed by P.Boersma and D.Weenink at the
  Institute of Phonetic Sciences, University of
  Amsterdam
• general purpose speech tool edition,
  segmentation and labeling, prosodic manipulation

16
(No Transcript)
17
Praat

• pros designed for speech analysis (not only
  sound edition or spectrogram visualization), nice
  GUI, scripting, active development and community,
  prosodic manipulation
• cons limited scripting language, native format
  of transcription and pitch files

18
WaveSurfer

• Open Source tool for sound visualization and
  manipulation
• speech/sound analysis and sound
  annotation/transcription
• platform for more advanced/specialized
  applications extending WaveSurfer with new
  custom plug-ins or embedding WaveSurfer
  visualization components in other applications
• Requires SnackToolKit

19
(No Transcript)
20
Transcriber

• Authors C. Barras, E. Geoffrois
• Relies on Snack (Tcl/tk)
• Good for annotation
• Nice, simple GUI
• No speech analysis

21
(No Transcript)
22
Matlab (Mathworks)

• Math. environment
• Signal processing toolbox filter-design,
  spectral analysis, waveform generation, linear
  prediction
• voicebox (2002) mike.brookes_at_ic.ac.uk
• pitch determination algorithm (2002) Xuejing Sun
  sunxj_at_northwestern.edu
• colea speech editor (1998) Philip Loizou
  loizou_at_utdallas.edu Univ of Texas-Dallas

23
Matlab (Mathworks)

• pros open, powerful, scripting, excellent
  plotting
• cons poor speech community, standards, not
  designed for big files

24
OGI speech tools/CSLU Toolkit

• development started in 1992 in C on Unix, at
  Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU)
  at OGI
• Includes
• An X windows display tool (LYRE) display, edit
  speech signal, spectrograms, phoneme labels, and
  other information
• a set of C library routines (LIBNSPEECH),
  utilities for converting file formats, filtering,
  Neural Network training, vector-quantizer,
  database utility to automate speech database
  related enquiries
• a set of PERL Scripts which have been used mainly
  to automate the use of the OGI Speech Tools.
• MAN Pages
• RAD rapid application development
• points of entry Package(C), script(tcl), GUI(tk)
  levels
• free for research use

25
(No Transcript)
26
Summary
Edit Anal Manip Annot Script Plot Format OS Evolut. Comm Price
Goldwave win 40
EspsWaves C sh Unix free
Praat yes nativeconsole sendpraat src free
wavesurfer snack C tcl/tkpython src free
transcriber xml free
OGI Toolkit free
matlab Sigproc packages native no BSD stud.100 40/tbx
yes but requires some dev.
27
Expect to do conversions

• Sound files
• goldwave (win)
• sox (unix)
• Transcription files
• scripts to convert text-formatted label files

28
Links

• www.goldwave.com
• www.speech.kth.se/software/esps
• www.praat.org
• www.speech.kth.se/software/wavesurfer
• www.cse.ogi.edu/toolkit
• www.mathworks.com (Matlab)
• www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/sqlab/ (phonedit)
• www.sciconrd.com/pworks.htm (PitchWorks)
• www.winpitch.com (WinPitch)
• www.adobe.com (CoolEdit gt Audition)