PhD F: Mmm .
Grad G: Oh . It looked OK , never mind . Um , yeah . And so , this this past week um , I 've been uh , looking a little bit into uh , TRAPS um , and doing doing TRAPS on on these e events too , just , um , seeing seeing if that 's possible . Uh , and um , other than that , uh , I was kicked out of I - house for living there for four years .
Professor C: Oh no . So you live in a cardboard box in the street now
Grad G: Yeah .
Professor C: or , no ?
Grad G: Uh , well , s s som something like that .
Professor C: Yeah .
Grad G: In Albany , yeah . Yeah . And uh . Yep . That 's it .
Professor C: Suni - i d ' you v did uh did you find a place ?
PhD A: Uh , no
Professor C: Is that out of the way ?
PhD A: not yet . Uh , yesterday I called up a lady who ha who will have a vacant room from May thirtieth and she said she 's interviewing two more people . So . And she would get back to me on Monday . So that 's that 's only thing I have and Diane has a few more houses . She 's going to take some pictures and send me after I go back . So it 's that 's Professor C: OK .
PhD F: Oh . So you 're not down here permanently yet ?
PhD A: No . I 'm going back to OGI today .
PhD F: Ah ! Oh , OK .
Grad G: Oh .
Professor C: OK . And then , you 're coming back uh PhD A: Uh , i I mean , I I p I plan to be here on thirty - first .
Professor C: Thirty - first ,
PhD A: Yeah , well if there 's a house available or place to Professor C: OK .
Grad G: Thirty - first .
Professor C: Well , I mean i i if if PhD A: Yeah , I hope .
Professor C: They 're available , and they 'll be able to get you something , so worst comes to worst we 'll put you up in a hotel for for for a while
PhD A: Yeah . So , in that case , I 'm going to be here on thirty - first definitely .
Professor C: until you OK .
Grad E: You know , if you 're in a desperate situation and you need a place to stay , you could stay with me for a while . I 've got a spare bedroom right now .
PhD A: Oh . OK . Thanks . That sure is nice of you . So , it may be he needs more than me .
Grad G: Oh r oh . Oh no , no . My my cardboard box is actually a nice spacious two bedroom apartment .
Professor C: So a two bedroom cardboard box . Th - that 's great .
PhD A: Yeah . Yeah . Yeah .
Professor C: Thanks Dave .
Grad G: yeah
PhD A: Yeah .
Professor C: Um ,
PhD A: Yeah .
Professor C: Do y wanna say anything about You you actually been Uh , last week you were doing this stuff with Pierre , you were you were mentioning . Is that that something worth talking about , or ?
Grad E: Um , it 's Well , um , it I don't think it directly relates . Um , well , so , I was helping a speech researcher named Pierre Divenyi and he 's int He wanted to um , look at um , how people respond to formant changes , I think . Um . So he he created a lot of synthetic audio files of vowel - to - vowel transitions , and then he wanted a psycho - acoustic um , spectrum . And he wanted to look at um , how the energy is moving over time in that spectrum and compare that to the to the listener tests . And , um . So , I gave him a PLP spectrum . And to um he he t wanted to track the peaks so he could look at how they 're moving . So I took the um , PLP LPC coefficients and um , I found the roots . This was something that Stephane suggested . I found the roots of the um , LPC polynomial to , um , track the peaks in the , um , PLP LPC spectra .
PhD A: well there is aligned spectral pairs , is like the the Is that the aligned s
Professor C: It 's a r root LPC , uh , of some sort .
PhD A: Oh , no .
PhD D: Mm - hmm .
PhD A: So you just Professor C: Yeah .
PhD A: instead of the log you took the root square , I mean cubic root or something . What di w I didn't get that .
Professor C: No , no . It 's it 's it 's taking the finding the roots of the LPC polynomial .
PhD A: Polynomial . Yeah . Is that the line spectral Professor C: So it 's like line spectral pairs .
PhD A: Oh , it 's like line sp
Professor C: Except I think what they call line spectral pairs they push it towards the unit circle , don't they ,
PhD A: Yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah .
Professor C: to sort of ? But it But uh , you know . But what we 'd used to do w when I did synthesis at National Semiconductor twenty years ago , the technique we were playing with initially was was taking the LPC polynomial and and uh , finding the roots . It wasn't PLP cuz Hynek hadn't invented it yet , but it was just LPC , and uh , we found the roots of the polynomial , And th When you do that , sometimes they 're f they 're what most people call formants , sometimes they 're not .
PhD A: Mmm .
Professor C: So it 's it 's it 's a little ,
PhD D: Hmm .
Professor C: uh Formant tracking with it can be a little tricky cuz you get these funny values in in real speech ,
PhD F: So you just You typically just get a few roots ?
Professor C: but .
PhD F: You know , two or three ,
Professor C: Well you get these complex pairs .
PhD F: something like that ?
Professor C: And it depends on the order that you 're doing , but .
PhD D: Mm - hmm .
Grad E: Right . So , um , if @ @ {comment} Every root that 's Since it 's a real signal , the LPC polynomial 's gonna have real coefficients . So I think that means that every root that is not a real root {comment} is gonna be a c complex pair ,
PhD F: Mm - hmm .
Grad E: um , of a complex value and its conjugate . Um . So for each And if you look at that on the unit circle , um , one of these one of the members of the pair will be a positive frequency , one will be a negative frequency , I think . So I just So , um , f for the I 'm using an eighth - order polynomial and I 'll get three or four of these pairs
Professor C: Yeah .
PhD A: Hmm .
Grad E: which give me s which gives me three or four peak positions .
Professor C: This is from synthetic speech , or ?
Grad E: It 's Right . Yeah .
Professor C: Yeah . So if it 's from synthetic speech then maybe it 'll be cleaner . I mean for real speech in real then what you end up having is , like I say , funny little things that are don't exactly fit your notion of formants all that well .
PhD F: How did Professor C: But but mostly they are .
PhD D: But
Professor C: Mostly they do .
PhD D: Yeah .
Grad E: Mmm ,
Professor C: And and what I mean in in what we were doing , which was not so much looking at things , it was OK
PhD D: I Professor C: because it was just a question of quantization . Uh , we were just you know , storing It was We were doing , uh , stored speech , uh , quantization .
PhD D: Mm - hmm .
Professor C: But but uh , in your case um , you know PhD D: Actually you have peaks that are not at the formant 's positions , but they are lower in energy
Grad E: But there 's some of that , yes .
PhD D: and Well they are much lower .
PhD F: If this is synthetic speech can't you just get the formants directly ? I mean h how is the speech created ?
Grad E: It was created from a synthesizer , and um PhD F: Wasn't a formant synthesizer was it ?
Professor C: I bet it it might have may have been
Grad E: I d d this Professor C: but maybe he didn't have control over it or something ?
Grad E: In in fact w we we could get , um , formant frequencies out of the synthesizer , as well . And , um , w one thing that the , um , LPC approach will hopefully give me in addition , um , is that I I might be able to find the b the bandwidths of these humps as well . Um , Stephane suggested looking at each complex pair as a like a se second - order IIR filter .
Professor C: Yeah .
Grad E: Um , but I don't think there 's a g a really good reason not to um , get the formant frequencies from the synthesizer instead . Except that you don't have the psycho - acoustic modeling in that .
Professor C: Yeah , so the actual So you 're not getting the actual formants per se . You 're getting the Again , you 're getting sort of the , uh PhD D: Mm - hmm .
Professor C: You 're getting something that is is uh , af strongly affected by the PLP model . And so it 's more psycho - acoustic . So it 's a little It 's It 's It 's sort of sort of a different thing .
PhD F: Oh , I see . That 's sort of the point .
Professor C: But Yeah . i Ordinarily , in a formant synthesizer , the bandwidths as well as the ban uh , formant centers are PhD F: Yeah .
Professor C: I mean , that 's Somewhere in the synthesizer that was put in , as as what you Grad E: Mm - hmm .
Professor C: But but yeah , you view each complex pair as essentially a second - order section , which has , uh , band center and band width , and um , um But . Yeah . O K . So , uh , yeah , you 're going back today and then back in a week I guess ,
PhD A: Yeah .