The formant menu

The functions handled by this menu supply tools for studying vowels and more generally provide a finer spectral analysis than the one provided by the spectrogram.

The menu commands:

Formants F1 F2 F3: Allows the tracking of a speech segment in the F1F2 plane. The result is displayed in another window under the main window of the application. Once the region of the spectrogram is delimited, it is dynamically displayed using the McCandless algorithm. The proposed algorithm is more efficient with vowels.

Data journaling (use “Show results” in “Miscellaneous menu”)

Time [ms] Time [sample] F0[Hz] Energy[dB] F1[Hz] F2[Hz]

F3[Hz] Phoneme[text] Word[text]

Note that energy is calculated according to parameters given in the menu “Prosody/Energy/Energy options”, and that F0, phoneme and word are defined only if the information does exist.

Cepstrum peak display: Displays the most visible peaks of the cepstrally smoothed spectra for the given speech segment. The cepstra are calculated over a 16 ms sample window with a 8 ms overlay. The user can choose the filtering coefficients through the Options command. Snoori evaluates the quality of the peaks displaying the best peaks in red and the others in black.

Data journaling (use “Show results” in “Miscellaneous menu”)

Time [ms] Time [sample] F0[Hz] Energy[dB] Phoneme[text] Word[text] {Frequency[Hz] Bandwidth[Hz] Amplitude[dB] for each peak}

Note that energy is calculated according to parameters given in the menu “Prosody/Energy/Energy options”, and that F0, phoneme and word are defined only if the information does exist.

True envelope peak display: Displays the most visible peaks of the cepstrally smoothed spectra obtained with the “true envelope algorithm” (S. Imai and Y. Abe, “Spectral envelope extraction by improved cepstral method”, Trans. IECE, Vol. J62-A(4), pp. 217-223, 1979) for the given speech segment. The cepstra are calculated over a 16 ms sample window with a 8 ms overlay. The user can choose the filtering coefficients through the Options command. Snoori evaluates the quality of the peaks displaying the best peaks in red and the others in black.

Data journaling (use “Show results” in “Miscellaneous menu”)

Time [ms] Time [sample] F0[Hz] Energy[dB] Phoneme[text] Word[text] {Frequency[Hz] Bandwidth[Hz] Amplitude[dB] for each peak}

Note that energy is calculated according to parameters given in the menu “Prosody/Energy/Energy options”, and that F0, phoneme and word are defined only if the information does exist.

LPC root display: Displays the LPC roots whose band width falls below 700 Hz. The window is a 16 ms Hamming. The order of the linear prediction can be set in the Options command.

Data journaling (use “Show results” in “Miscellaneous menu”)

Time [ms] Time [sample] F0[Hz] Energy[dB] Phoneme[text] Word[text] {Frequency[Hz] Bandwidth[Hz] Amplitude[dB] for each root}

Note that energy is calculated according to parameters given in the menu “Prosody/Energy/Energy options”, and that F0, phoneme and word are defined only if the information does exist.

Spectral slice: Allows the display of spectral slices. There are two FFT spectra, one LPC spectrum, one selective LPC spectrum, and two cepstrally smoothed spectra. To obtain the spectral slices, one simply needs to click anywhere on the spectrogram (cf. details and options)

Klatt synthesizer: Opens the editor for files of parameters for the Klatt synthesizer which is accompanied by the display of the corresponding panel. This command plots and superimposes trajectories of formants drawn with the mouse onto the spectrogram window (cf. detailed description).

Options: Opens a panel to allow the modification of the options of the two menu commands “Cepstral peak display” and “LPC  root display” as follows:

for the command “Cepstral peak display”:

shift between two consecutive spectra

beginning of liftering

end of liftering

for the command “LPC root display”:

shift between two consecutive spectra

LPC order.