Revision as of 22:44, 23 April 2017

Hello, World!

by Alden Fisher

Introduction

My original intent was to insert an audio file into Matlab and have it print out what I was saying in plain text. This proved to be a challenge for several reasons which I will get to later. What I ended up doing instead was finding the 1st and 2nd formants in the famous sentence "Hello, world."

Challenges

The toughest part of the original plan was in finding a table that mapped out the formants of the 42 phonemes [1] in the English language. This left me with nothing to compare my results to so the computer had no viable data to use. For this reason, I changed the direction of the project to the current goal. Additionally, it was hard, even as a native English speaker, to understand how the IPA is set up [3]. In essence, it was difficult to get through the literature and understand how to accurately map a word, preserving each sound. Charts were found for vowels, however. The phonemes were found for each word [4], but there were no data about their corresponding formants.

Approach

I audio recorded me in a quiet room saying the phrase "Hello, World." This was recorded on my iPhone which has a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. From there, I converted the file [2] to a '.wav' so that it would be compatible on all computing platforms. Once I had the audio file, I manually trimmed the data to, basically, get rid of any dead time. One assumption I made was that each of the 10 letters lasted the same amount of time. For this reason, I took 10 DFTs using the 'DFTwin' function we created in lab 9a [1]. From there, I extracted the first 2 largest peaks (the formants). Once I had these, I was able to plot them in 3-space with respect to the letters.

Matlab Code

Conclusion

In a strange (and error-prone way), I was able to collect some data about my speech and where exactly my formants lie.

[1] Purdue ECE 438, "ECE438 - Laboratory 9: Speech Processing (Week 1)", October 6, 2010, https://engineering.purdue.edu/VISE/ee438L/lab9/pdf/lab9a.pdf.

Lab used for general direction and background information, including the formant chart for vowels

[2] http://www.zamzar.com/

Free online software used to convert the audio file

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

Background information on how the words are structured and understood

[4] http://phonemicchart.com/transcribe/1000_basic_words.html

Used to get the official phonetic spelling for both words