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H D Abbas – Analysis of Vowel Articulation & Perception

Haala Deeba Abbas received his Master of Science in  Computer Science and Engineering (CSE).  His research work was supervised by Dr. Suryakanth. Here’s a summary of his research work on Analysis of Vowel Articulation and Perception using Acoustic Parameters.

Speech is the most basic and reliable form of communication. In signal processing, speech signal carrying the message is represented in the form of an acoustic waveform. Having an insight into acoustics of speech contributes to production and perception robustness. One of the best means to analyse the speech signal is by exploiting the acoustic parameters of speech sounds. Study of acoustic parameters brings out a rigorous introduction to acoustics of speech and finds application in speech analysis, production and perception. In this thesis, work mainly centres on analysing vowel articulation and perception with the help of acoustic parameters, namely acoustic correlates. Vowels are sonorants and convey most of the information present in the speech signal. All the three works in this thesis mainly focus on studies related to vowel sounds and use formants as the basic spectral cue. Minor work has been extended to nasals in the first study. Formant bandwidth, one of the crucial acoustic correlates, was extracted for oral and nasal tracts using vowel and nasal articulations respectively. The exploitation of acoustic correlates of vowels against speech performance among different categories of gender was conducted in the second study. Here, the computed formants are utilised to construct vowel space area used for the comparison. Also, the role of source-filter was analysed in perception of vowels. This study too incorporated formants in the vocal tract response of the LP method.

Studying the acoustic correlates of speech sounds would greatly enhance the knowledge on acoustical aspects of speech useful in Acoustic Phonetics, Auditory Phonetics, Speech Analysis, Speech Synthesis, Speech Signal Processing, to understand and evaluate speech signal.

May 2023