I’m struck by how different this project might have turned out if I’d made some divergent choices along the way. I briefly played with other forced aligners besides Gentle that return different kinds of information. Darla, for example, gave me results with the formants for each vowel. Some forced aligners output the data in TextGrid …
Author Archives: Ian Douglas-Moore
The Max patch
As mentioned in a previous post, I decided to use the MuBu set of Max/MSP objects to organize and access my audio files. A MuBu is a “multi-buffer” that can hold lots of associated data. It’s typically used to store audio files, and analysis data derived from each file. This can be accessed by various …
More phones
Well, as phones are linked to possible sounds regardless of language and meaning, it would appear they are the same worldwide. But one organization that has kept track of them is the Speech Group at Carnegie Mellon University. Their CMU Pronouncing Dictionary is a dictionary of mostly English words with pronunciation given in phones. Their …
Phones
So I had my segmented words, now I just needed to do batches of analysis to get information that my Max patch could use to trigger the words. Professor Devaney showed me some of the features I might look to extract and methods in Python to do so. Getting F0 and MFCC content looked particularly …
Segmentation and my first Python script
The next thing I did was create a Python script to segment the larger audio file into 50 individual files with useful filenames. I adapted a script that uses the Python bindings for FFmpeg, a tool for converting audio. The script takes the following arguments: Audio file to be segmented File with timing information Speaker …
Using Gentle forced aligner
In my first post I outlined a few of my interests in creative use of the voice and started to talk about the prep work I’m doing for an upcoming project that will use a large body of sound files consisting of a single spoken word each, that can be called up and played back …
First steps
Hello. I’m working on an independent study. Please see the About page for general information. This is a skeletal look at my progress so far, to be fleshed out soon. What I’m working on: Learning about the workings of the voice — how sound is produced and varied, what the results are. Reading The Science …
