The Lecture Room

Welcome to the Lecture Room. The pages listed here have been carefully chosen for their interest to learners. These are not just pages of dry text, but material that has been designed to inform and educate; many of the pages allow interaction and try to challenge your understanding.

Science of Sound

The Physics of Sound. Well illustrated and informative pages covering: "What is Sound?", "Properties of a Sound Wave", "Speed of Sound", "Constructive and Destructive Interference", "Diffraction", "The Doppler Effect", and "Intensity".

The Physics Classroom: Sound Waves and Music. An introductory tutorial on the Physics of Sound designed for schoolchildren. Contains useful self-test questions.

Science of Hearing

Web tutorial on Loudness by Mark Huckvale. An extensive interactive tutorial about how our sense of loudness is related to the physical form of sound and the operation of our hearing mechanism.

Web tutorial on Pitch by Mark Huckvale. An extensive interactive tutorial about how our sense of pitch is related to the physical form of sound and the operation of our hearing mechanism.

A Promenade Round the Cochlea. Take a virtual tour around the anatomy and physiology of the ear. With lots of graphics (e.g. above).

Science of Speech

Speech Signal Analysis. This is just a single page outlining the various ways in which the speech signal can be analysed and displayed. It demonstrates the waveform, the fundamental frequency trace, the spectrum and the spectrogram for a simple utterance. It also has an elementary description of how these pictures are generated and used.

Spectrogram Reading Tutorial. Spectrograms are representations of a speech signal which emphasise the aspects our ears are sensitive to. Thus somewhere in the spectrogram are the clues (or cues) which tell us what is being said. This course from the Oregon Graduate Institute is about how to 'read' spectrograms - how to see the phonetic detail in the acoustic form.

Articulation

Organs of Speech. With good graphics of the vocal tract and an x-ray movie.

Animation of Articulography Measurements. Gives an idea of how direct measurements of articulator position can be correlated with sound.

An introduction to coarticulation. Slides from a lecture on coarticulation.

MRI images of vocal tract shapes. As an alternative to X-rays, MRI scanners are safe but slow. However this site shows how 3D models can be generated from MRI data.

Excitation

Respiration and air-stream mechanisms. Notes on how air flow is controlled for speaking.

The animation below comes from UCLA.

Methods for examining the larynx and phonation. How some of the pictures and movies above were obtained.

Voice Qualities. A discussion of how different voice qualities such as Modal, Breathy, Creaky and Falsetto originate in the Larynx. Also how the ElectroGlottograph (or Laryngograph) operates to show these.

Speech Technology

Tutorial on Text to Speech Systems. A web tutorial on speech synthesis systems, with an overview of their architecture and experiments in speech generation.

Phonetics/Phonology

On-line course in Phonetics. Translated from the French.

Web Tutorials in Phonetics. These tutorials from University College London include: the Phonetics of voicing: how vibration in the larynx is the sound source for many speech sounds. the Phonetics of plosives: how sounds like p, t, k are made and contrasted. on-line phonetic transcription: practise your use of the phonetic alphabet. intonation transcription: practise your ability to identify different pitch contours used in speech.

Prosody on the Web. An on-line tutorial about prosody: chunking, focus and pitch.

On-line Phonology Course. This we course from Stirling University is of interest to those learning the phonology and the transcription of English R.P.(Received Pronunciation). The course is specially designed for teaching and accessible to both native and non-native English speakers.

Notes for a University Course in Phonetics and Phonology. Includes useful descriptions with figures of the anatomy of the vocal tract.

The Mouton Interactive Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. A preview of a forthcoming interactive teaching CD-ROM publication.

Linguistics

Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. Corpus linguistics is the study of linguistics through the medium of geneuine collected materials, often with a statistical flavour. These pages are designed to accompany a book in corpus linguistics, but also serve as a general introduction to the field.

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