HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: dfrankow@myria.cs.umn.edu (Dan Frankowski)
Subject: Objective measure of speech quality
Keywords: speech recognition
Organization: University of Minnesota
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 16:26:51 GMT

In <9228109.19223@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> mfw@mullauna.cs.mu.OZ.AU
  (Michael John FEARN-WANNAN) writes:

>lels@unpcs1.cs.unp.ac.za (Leonard Els) writes:

>>I am working on a Speaker Independant Speech Recognition system and was
>>wondering what the best measurements are, to use in the analysis.

>>I have come accross the following: Zero-Crossing rate, Energy, LPC,
>>Cepstral Coefficients, and formant analysis

>>Can I use formant analysis for speaker independant recognition? - or
>>should I rather use something else - If formant analysis is not a good
>>idea - why not?

>If you were to take human speech recognition as a model you would
>probably find that all of these analyses and more were being used. There
>are all sorts of mechanisms at work in real live speech recognition. It
>is unlikely that you can find any one mathematical/engineering type
>analysis of a wave form which will give you all the information you need.

> ...

>Perhaps you should consider using multiple analyses of a waveform and
>applying >them to some kind of probabilistic model. Maybe get them to
>cast some vote >about what the segment might represent.. 

> ... (many interesting, blue-sky speculations deleted)

>Regards,
>Michael

This conversation rouses my interest in a related topic: objective
measurement of speech quality.  Suppose we have a signal x(n) of
original speech, we transmit it and get a signal y(n) of the speech
the person on the other end hears.  What sorts of filters are there
that can take x(n) and y(n) and return a quantitative measure of
speech quality?

I did a literature search and contacted the author of a
wonderful-sounding method, only to discover that they are trying to
commercialize it and cannot release any information.

I am off to the library again to try and find more papers and
contact more authors.  I would appreciate any ideas or references
the net.speech.experts have.

Dan

--
Dan Frankowski                dfrankow@cs.umn.edu
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: rolfe@fraser.sfu.ca (Christopher John Rolfe)
Subject: Acoustic Analyses of Vowel Formant
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 20:53:23 GMT

Hello,

	Can anyone offer references to acoustical analyses of 
vowel formant data, especially spectrographic analysis 
and/or 3D FFT plots? ( that is, time variant formant analysis rather
than the static 1st formant/2nd formant X/Y plot ).   
Is there a standard reference for this information? 

	Even better yet, is there an FTP site for PICT, 
TIFF, or other graphic format for this data? ( I have 
FFT and spectrographic analyses of my own few samples, and would
like to compare them against a more compendious study ).  

        I am particularly interested in the female voice, and the
singing voice.  Has anyone extended the work of Johan Sundberg?  

	Thanks for any help.



-- 
Chris                   | 2617 East 4th,| If brevity is the soul of 
rolfe@sfu.ca            | Van., B.C.    | wit, what is semibrevity
Simon Fraser University | V5M 1K5       | the soul of?
Burnaby,  Canada        | Canada        |
From: jpcampb@afterlife.ncsc.mil (Joe Campbell)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: Objective measure of speech quality
Keywords: speech recognition
Date: 10 Oct 92 18:14:27 GMT
Organization: The Great Beyond

In article <dfrankow.718561611@myria> dfrankow@myria.cs.umn.edu (Dan Frankowski) writes:
>In <9228109.19223@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> mfw@mullauna.cs.mu.OZ.AU
>  (Michael John FEARN-WANNAN) writes:
>
>>lels@unpcs1.cs.unp.ac.za (Leonard Els) writes:
>
>>>I am working on a Speaker Independant Speech Recognition system and was
>>>wondering what the best measurements are, to use in the analysis.
>
>>>I have come accross the following: Zero-Crossing rate, Energy, LPC,
>>>Cepstral Coefficients, and formant analysis
>
>>>Can I use formant analysis for speaker independant recognition? - or
>>>should I rather use something else - If formant analysis is not a good
>>>idea - why not?
>
>>If you were to take human speech recognition as a model you would
>>probably find that all of these analyses and more were being used. There
>>are all sorts of mechanisms at work in real live speech recognition. It
>>is unlikely that you can find any one mathematical/engineering type
>>analysis of a wave form which will give you all the information you need.
>
>> ...
>
>>Perhaps you should consider using multiple analyses of a waveform and
>>applying >them to some kind of probabilistic model. Maybe get them to
>>cast some vote >about what the segment might represent.. 
>
>> ... (many interesting, blue-sky speculations deleted)
>
>>Regards,
>>Michael
>
>This conversation rouses my interest in a related topic: objective
>measurement of speech quality.  Suppose we have a signal x(n) of
>original speech, we transmit it and get a signal y(n) of the speech
>the person on the other end hears.  What sorts of filters are there
>that can take x(n) and y(n) and return a quantitative measure of
>speech quality?
>
>I did a literature search and contacted the author of a
>wonderful-sounding method, only to discover that they are trying to
>commercialize it and cannot release any information.
>
>I am off to the library again to try and find more papers and
>contact more authors.  I would appreciate any ideas or references
>the net.speech.experts have.
>
>Dan
>
>--
>Dan Frankowski                dfrankow@cs.umn.edu

I recommend Shihua Wang, et al. "Auditory Distortion Measure for Speech
Coding," ICASSP-91 and her Ph.D. dissertation from UCSB.

Also see S. Quackenbush, et al., "Objective Measures of Speech Quality,"
Prentice-Hall, 1988.

Joe
-- 
.............................................................................
; Joe Campbell  N3JBC  jpcampb@afterlife.ncsc.mil  74040.305@compuserve.com ;
; My opinions are mine!   Happiness = Reality - Expectations, Click & Clack ;
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: eha@phoenix (Esa Haapaniemi)
Subject: Computerspeech through phonelines.
Organization: University of Oulu, Finland
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 06:52:13 GMT

: Has anyone come across a good text-to-speech (over the phone) to another
: line end program.  In other words a program that will put the output 
: through the phone line to the receiver's speaker on the phone...?

This brings to my mind that one of my friends made a rexx macro for his
database program (SuperBaseIV) to receive phoenicalls, and in some way
finding out the person who was calling, and giving a personal message
from his stored spoken messages.  Those messages were still prerecorded.

Esa Haapaniemi
University of Oulu
Finland
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: dfrankow@giga.cs.umn.edu (Dan Frankowski)
Subject: References for objective measures of speech quality
Keywords: speech recognition
Organization: University of Minnesota
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 14:26:23 GMT

Hi all,

Several people asked me to post the references I received on objective
measures of speech quality.  I have gathered them into a list in no
particular order.  There was one book (by Quackenbush) suggested
twice, so that is near the top (it's the fourth one).  Enjoy.

Dan Frankowski       dfrankow@cs.umn.edu

P.S.  Sorry about posting email addresses without permission.  I went
back and forth, but it didn't seem it would be too harmful in this
case.  NOTE: all future contributions should indicate whether they
wish their name posted or not.  Thanks.

------------------------------------------------------------

I read the following two papers:

"An Objective Measure for Predicting Subjective Quality of
Speech Coders", Shihua Wang, Andrew Sekey, Allen Gersho,
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, June 1992

Comments: A sophisticated new speech quality measure that predicts the
Mean Opinion Score (MOS) with a correlation coefficient of around
0.90.  Unfortunately, the authors are trying to commercialize the
product, so they aren't releasing any code.

"Objective Speech Distortion Measures and Their Relevance to Speech
Quality Assessments", S. Dimolitsas, IEE Proceedings, Vol. 136 Pt. I,
No. 5, October 1989

Comments: A good survey of speech quality assessments up to 1989 with
many good references.

------------------------------------------------------------

These others have been recommended by other netters.  They are
included in no particular order.  Thanks very much for your responses.

From Joe Campbell (jpcampb@afterlife.ncsc.mil):

"Auditory Distortion Measure for Speech Coding," Shihua Wang et. al.,
ICASSP-91 and her Ph.D. dissertation from UCSB.

From Raymond Edward Slyh (slyh@ee.eng.ohio-state.edu):

Objective Measures of Speech Quality, S.R. Quackenbush, T.P. Barnwell III,
M.A. Clements, Prentice-Hall, 1988

His own code adapted from the book.

From Margaret H Pinson (margaret@ntia.its.bldrdoc.gov):

Reports from the Institute for Telecommunications Science (ITS) in the
government publications section of the library or from the Executive
Office at 325 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado 80303 (telephone:303-497-3572).

The ANSI standards committee T1Y1.

R.F. Kubichek, et al. "Speech Quality Assessment using Expert
Pattern Recognition Techniques," IEEE Pacific Rim Converence on Computers,
Communication, and Signal Processing, June 1989.

Bell Northern Research, "Objective evaluation of non-linear distortion
effects on voice transmission quality," Contribution to CCITT, Annex 3
to Question 13/XII, COM XII-1-E, pp 100-102, 1987.

NTT, "Proposal of objective quality measure for voiceband codecs,"
COM XII-8-E, April, 1985.

From Jay Naik (naik@nynexst.com):

Papers by Tom Barnwell at Georgia Tech, in IEEE ASSP (what is this?)
and J. Acoustical Soc. Amer.
--
Dan Frankowski                dfrankow@cs.umn.edu
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: vtrinh@ee.ubc.ca
Subject: Pitch Control
Organization: University of BC, Electrical Engineering
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 19:18:49 GMT


I have a PCM waveform (vowel sound), and I would like to
alter the pitch of the sound.  Does anybody have any
ideas on how to do this?

Any help is appreciated,
     
   Vincent Trinh
   vtrinh@ee.ubc.ca
From: dfrankow@exa.cs.umn.edu (Dan Frankowski)
Subject: Re: Objective measure of speech quality
Organization: University of Minnesota
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 22:00:45 GMT

In <D88-JWA.92Oct8202432@byse.nada.kth.se> d88-jwa@byse.nada.kth.se (Jon Wtte) writes:

>(Dan Frankowski) writes:

>   the person on the other end hears.  What sorts of filters are there
>   that can take x(n) and y(n) and return a quantitative measure of
>   speech quality?

>None, bar a panel of 100 or more test subjects.

>Jon W{tte, h+@nada.kth.se, Sweden, Phone +46-8-107069

Not so.  There has been research in this area.  The method is this:
think up a filter that you think accurately reflects human perception
(first a lowpass filter, then a comb filter to take into account this
and that part of the cochlea, etc.).  Then (here's the good part) take
the measure and test it on samples of speech that have been rated with
the Mean Opinion Score (MOS), which is 100 people listening to it and
rating it excellent (5), good (4), fair(3), poor (2), yuck(1).

If your measure usually gets the same MOS as the 100 people, it's
probably pretty good.  Neat, eh?

I have a few references, if people are interested.  I have also gotten
a few replies to my original post that have been very informative.
Thanks, people.

Dan

--
Dan Frankowski                dfrankow@cs.umn.edu
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: gautemyk@idt.unit.no (Gaute Myklebust)
Subject: audio FAQ
Reply-To: gautemyk@idt.unit.no (Gaute Myklebust)
Organization: Div. of CS & Telematics, Norwegian Institute of Technology
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 92 10:58:27 GMT

Does anyone have a copy of the audio file format FAQ ?
Please mail me a copy.

Thanks
-- 
Gaute Myklebust (Doctoral Student)           | E-mail: gautemyk@idt.unit.no
Division of Telematics and Computer Science  | Phone: +47-7-594458
The Norwegian Institute of Technology        | Adr. Singsaker Studenterhjem
N-7034 TRONDHEIM, NORWAY                     | N-7016 TRONDHEIM, NORWAY
From: graff@chestnut.ling.upenn.edu (David Graff)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: isolated digits databases
Date: 8 Oct 92 20:56:43 GMT

In article <HEMPHILL.92Oct7152837@phonon.csc.ti.com>, hemphill@phonon.csc.ti.com (Charles Hemphill) writes:
|> 
|> The following includes isolated digits.  NIST has many other speech
|> corpora available.
|> 
|> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
|>                    Studio Quality Speaker-Independent 
|>                           Connected-Digit Corpus
|>                                 (TIDIGITS)
|> 
|>                                 CD-ROM Set
|> 
|>                    NIST Speech Discs 4-1, 4-2, and 4-3
|>                               February, 1991
|> 
|> 
|> This three-disc set of CD-ROMs contains a corpus of speech which...
|>
[detailed description deleted]

Mr. Hemphill forgot to mention how to contact NIST, so (I hope my
friends at NIST won't hate me for this):

Mail:      NIST
           Technology Building, Room A-216
           Gaithersburg, MD  20899

Email:     dave@jaguar.ncsl.nist.gov (David Pallett)
           john@jaguar.ncsl.nist.gov (John Garofolo)

Phone:     (301) 975-2935 (David Pallett)
           (301) 975-3193 (John Garofolo)

Fax:       (301) 975-2128  - or -
           (301) 590-0932 

Mr. Hemphill also did not mention that TIDIGITS, as well as the many
other speech corpora available from NIST (plus additional speech
corpora from other sources), is being made available to academic and
commercial institutions through the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC),
which is based at the University of Pennsylvania, under the direction
of Mark Liberman.  In addition to distributing large amounts of speech
and text data bases, the LDC will be soliciting data collection
efforts, the results of which will also be made available on cd-rom.
Anyone having substantial speech or text data bases that they would
like to make available to others through the LDC should contact Dr.
Liberman:  myl@sansom.ling.upenn.edu

Obtaining data from the LDC involves enrolling as a member in the
Consortium, which in turn involves a fee and a membership agreement.
Anyone interested in finding out about the LDC should send e-mail to
Elizabeth Hodas:  ehodas@walnut.ling.upenn.edu

Please send mail to me if you have questions about the content or
technical details of LDC corpora.

-- 
David Graff			Linguistic Data Consortium
graff@chestnut.ling.upenn.edu	441 Williams Hall
voice: (215) 898-0887		University of Pennsylvania
fax:   (215) 573-2175		Philadelphia, PA 19104
Newsgroups: comp.speech,comp.ai.neural-nets,sci.electronics
From: iqbal@pawnee.eel.ufl.edu (M.Iqbal)
Subject: Re: A chip that could recognize simple speech.
Organization: University of Florida
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 92 19:26:03 GMT

Although I am in more digital communication, I have seen some good
chips for audio application by Motorola. I do not remember off hand
their number, however, if you can get hold of Motorola Telecommunica-
tion device data book you should be able to locate the chip. The data
book has placed chips under applications. Therefore, look under audio
chips.

Good luck

 
-- 

------------------------------------------------------------------
                                            
      						 >><<<     >>><<<<
Iqbal@sioux.eel.ufl.edu		 		 (o o)     (o) (o)
University of Florida				 [ | ]        | 
                                  		   -         ---
From: jeffg@loki.esd.sgi.com (Jeff C. Glover)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: Phoneme prog/data for SGI Indigo?
Date: 7 Oct 92 15:58:08 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: loki.esd.sgi.com

In article <1992Oct5.230617.20423@news.iastate.edu> Terran Boylan writes:
>Does anybody have a Phoneme-based or just plain
>ANY speech generation program for the Indigo?
>
>I know that it would require a lot of memory, but maybe
>less than one might think.

I've ported the phoneme-based package to the Indigo from the sources in
wilma.cs.brown.edu:~ftp/pub/speak.tar.Z with little trouble.  Right now
I'm tracking down a few bugs that cause AL error messages, but I'll
post the diffs for the package as soon as that gets done.

The results are less then stellar, but understandable.  The phoneme
samples are irregular and some filtering on the resulting speech
might improve the result.

The total time to do the port took about 30 minutes; it was my first
libaudio program for the Indigo.  I also converted the phoneme samples
from the format in the archives to AIFC so I could use libaudiofile.

Jeff
jeffg@sgi.com
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: mjackson@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Michel T Jackson)
Subject: Re: Vocal Tract Data During Vowel Production
Summary: various souces
Keywords: vowel x-rays
Organization: The Ohio State University
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 19:35:59 GMT

There are a number of sources, some good, some not so good.

A lot of work has been done on midsagittal dimension-to-cross-sectional area 
functions.  Try Sidney Wood's dissertation from the University of Lund (Working
Papers in Lingusitics 23 (1982) "X-Ray and Model Studies of Vowel 
Articulation", pp. 1-192).  Wood has also published in journals like J. Acoust.
Soc. Am. (Wood, S. 1986. "The acoustical significance of tongue, lip, and 
larynx maneuvers in rounded palatal vowels", J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80 (2), 
391-401.)

For a source of raw data, consider Bothorel, A., Simon, P., Wioland, F., & 
Zerling, J.-P. 1986. Cineradiographie des Voyelles et Consonnes du Francais 
(Travaux de l'Institut de Phonetique de Strasbourg). Strasbourg: Universite des
Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg.  This book contains numerous sagittal-plane 
x-rays of four speakers of French, and LPC spectra with formant frequencies and
bandwidths derived from the same tabulated.

There is little recent work of this sort in this country, because of health 
regulations - the x-ray dose for this kind of work is pretty high.  However, a 
good set of x-rays of American English vowels was made by J. de Clerk (sp?) and
the data (including format frequencies) were later analyzed in Harshman, R., 
Ladefoged, P., & Goldstein, L. (1977) "Factor analysis of tongue shapes", J. 
Acoust. Soc. Am. 62, 693-707. and Ladefoged, P., Harshman, R., Goldstein, L. & 
Rice, L. (1978) "Generating vocal tract shapes from formant frequencies", J. 
Acoust. Soc. Am. 64(4), 1027-1035.
From: pjm@SPEECH.CS.CMU.EDU (Pedro J. Moreno)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: some referencees needed
Date: 16 Oct 92 20:00:31 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.Bw8Cww.IHB.2
Reply-To: pjm@stevens.SPEECH.CS.CMU.EDU (Pedro J. Moreno)
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon


Hi everybody!

I have been looking in the past weeks for references about these two  
topics:

1> Non linear effects in the carbon microphone (the one used in many  
telephone terminals)

2> Non linear effects (in general) in the telephone channel

I'd appreciate any suggestions, books , journal papers, whatever, it seems  
pretty hard to find these references in our library, maybe out there there  
are people with some key references.....


thanks a lot for your help..


--
Pedro J. Moreno			(NeXTMail yes!!)
Graduate Student
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Speech Group
pjm@stevens.speech.cs.cmu.edu 
Carnegie Mellon University
From: ajr@eng.cam.ac.uk (Tony Robinson)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: can you recommend a grad school ?
Date: 10 Oct 92 11:10:35 GMT
Organization: Cambridge University Engineering Department, UK

In article <9210082144.aa27929@Bonnie.ics.uci.edu> amilota@Bonnie.ICS.UCI.EDU writes:
>Can anyone recommend or at least name some Universities where they are working
>on voice recognition and give PHDs for studying it.

The number is certainly large.  Rather than giving a few names, I suggest
getting hold of one or two of the last proceedings of the IEEE conference in
Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (or the International Conference on
Spoken Language Processing) and looking through for universities that
regularly present in your chosen field.  This will give you a rough idea of
the quality of the work, and potential advisors.  I realise that this
represents quite a lot of work, but once compiled it could be pointed to by
the FAQ list and give others a head start.

Tony [Robinson]
From: psilsbee@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Peter Silsbee)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: prosody
Keywords: prosody
Date: 12 Oct 92 15:16:34 GMT
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX

In article <karenj.718267851@munagin> karenj@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Karen Jenkin) writes:
>I am curious about whether any prosody processing has been researched
>in speech recogntion (more specifically phonemes).
>The analysis of prosody could also be being used in the "voice-stress"
>experiments recently discussed in this group.
>
>Can anyone direct me to some refs. or ftp sites on the subject of prosody?

Someone has already mentioned Dr. Waibel's work. However, he has published
quite a bit more on the subject since his ICASSP paper.

 AUTHOR:         Waibel, Alex
  TITLE:          Prosody and speech recognition / Alex Waibel.
  PUBLISHED:      London : Pitman ; San Mateo, Calif. : Morgan Kaufmann
                    Publishers, 1988.
  DESCRIPTION:    212 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
  NOTES:          "Pitman advanced publishing program."
                  Includes index.
                  Bibliography: p. 199-212.
  SUBJECTS:       Automatic speech recognition
                  Prosodic analysis (Linguistics)
  SERIES:         Research notes in artificial intelligence.
  ISBN:           0934613702 (Morgan Kaufmann)
  OCLC NUMBER:    18070817

I think this is a collection edited by Dr. Waibel on the subject.

See also:  
  TITLE:          Readings in speech recognition / edited by Alex Waibel &
                    Kai-Fu Lee.
  PUBLISHED:      San Mateo, Calif. : Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, c1990.
  DESCRIPTION:    x, 629 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.
  NOTES:          Includes index.
                  Includes bibliographical references.
  SUBJECTS:       Automatic speech recognition
                  Speech processing systems
  OTHER AUTHORS:  Waibel, Alex
                  Lee, Kai-Fu.
  ISBN:           1558601244
  OCLC NUMBER:    20827344

which contains an article by Waibel on the use of prosody, and is probably
a good book to have around anyway.

--Peter
From: mhall@occs.cs.oberlin.edu (Matthew Hall)
Subject: Voice recognition alg. wanted.
Organization: Oberlin College Computer Science
Distribution: comp.speech
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 18:52:57 GMT
X-Posted-From: occs.cs.oberlin.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

Hello-
	I am looking for a voice recognition algorithm.  I want the
bottom of the line, basic, Speaker dependant, not necessarily
continuous, and with a vocabulary of less than 100, probably much
less, commands.  This algorithm should be able to take a block of raw
sound data and figure if there are any commands in it, and if so, what
they are.
	Any information or pointers would be greatly appreciated. I
have tried a few bibliographic systems to no avail.

Thank you,
-matt hall
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Hall.    mhall@occs.oberlin.edu  OR  SMH9666@OBERLIN.BITNET
              (216)-775-6613 (That's a Cleveland Area code. Lucky Me)

"Life's good, but not fair at all"  -Lou Reed
From: tchang@athena.cs.uga.edu
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Looking for Hardware Tools for Speech Processing
Date: 16 Oct 92 17:21:04 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens


Hi all,

I am looking for some hardware/software tools for speech synthesizer
and speech recognition (for use on PCs).  

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Tony
Newsgroups: comp.speech