hi everyone here we are in the video
instructions for homework 1 assignment
one I've probably called it both of
those things uh at various times in the
semester but homeworks assignments it's
all the same thing your first assignment
has been posted and released albeit not
completely because this video has not
yet been made on your canvas site um and
I just want to walk you through some of
the laboratory Parts meaning some of the
using props Parts before we do this I
just want to remind us that we're remind
us remind you um that we are using the
pallet of voices uh wave files the
pallet of voices um digitized speech
files for this homework assignment the
pallet of voices is a public access
Corpus of the speech of a variety of of
masculine identifying men including both
cisgender men transgender men and um
transgender transmasculine non-binary
folks as well um people who contributed
to the pallet of voices agreed to have
their speech released to a public Corpus
so there's certainly nothing um unusual
about this use for it but I do want to
have you keep in mind that the people
who participated in this um you know
deserve privacy and really deserve
respect so you know as you're using this
treat these data respectfully this was a
great gift from the people who
participated to um to the clinical world
and to the speech Science World such as
it is so please treat these recordings
respectfully um and carefully and when
you're done with this homework
assignment ask you to delete them from
whatever computer you're
using first thing we're going to do is
download that and so you can see now why
I started out with all of those provisos
all of those little warnings is because
the first thing I'm going to have you do
is to download the U files on to
whatever computer you're going to use
for this homework assignment and the way
that we're going to do this is just by
clicking on this do collection file
that's going to take us to another
window and in that window there'll be a
little button that says download blahy
blahy blah you want to download that now
where is that going to go really depends
on your operating system for me on a
Windows operating system it goes into a
folder called downloads um I am I am a a
I am a hybrid Mac PC user and so I um I
think I know where it would go if I were
on my Mac I'm not on my Mac right now if
you're on
Linux if you're on Linux then you're
probably the kind of user who doesn't
need me to tell you where your downloads
folder is because Linux users tend to be
kind of power users don't they all right
so that's the first thing second thing
and maybe that should have been the
first thing is we want to make sure that
you already have Pro so um go to
www.pr a.org and download the version of
prot for your operating system I have
downloaded prot and used 8 chillion
times and here it is already open on my
computer so here we are in prot and I
certainly hope I've shared my screen in
such a way that I'm not going to have to
remake this video um so we want to first
thing we want to do is read in that do
collection file which is really just an
archive of 20 different wave files we're
going to do that through the open menu
open read from file and then we're going
to navigate to the folder where this is
for me um it's going to be in downloads
you can see I've actually downloaded it
multiple times
here um and here we are so I've um read
in all 20 of these um files so
Poore 001 012 etc etc those are just the
different participant IDs and in this
exercise everybody is going to be saying
sentence
11 uh this exercise is going this
homework this assignment is going to
have you first listen to the files and
make some qualitative ratings of them so
the first thing I want you to do is just
listen to all 20 files in a row um and
just get a sense of what the range of
variation is in these files um I will
not do that here because it's just going
to take up more time on this recording
but if you want to listen to multiple
files in Pro you can just select
multiple files with your mouse let's say
in this case let's just select the first
three and then once you press play it's
going to play everything you that you've
selected so if you select all 20 and
press play you got to listen to All 20
I'm not sure there's a An Elegant way to
interrupt it other than Force quitting
the application let's just play these an
ample wall needs at least four layers of
bricks an ample wall needs at least four
layers of bricks an ample wall needs at
least four layers of bricks right so if
we went through and listened to all 20
of those that's the first thing I want
you to do is just listen and get a sense
of what the range of these is once
you've done that let's pivot over here
to the assign itself the first thing
that I want you to well the first thing
we've already done the first thing and
the second thing and the third thing the
next thing that I want you to do is to
make some um perceptual ratings so your
kind of gut instincts of how um fast or
not fast the person speaks and how much
pitch variation you think the person
uses right and the reason that we're
choosing these two parameters is once
you've made these perceptual ratings
you're going to go in and make some um
objective ratings of rative speech and
pitch variation and part of the
assignment is to see how your um rate of
speech and Pitch variation measures
measures compar to your rate of speech
and Pitch variation ratings so for each
of the sentences go back and listen to
it so after you've listened to all 20 go
back in and listen to them individually
so this time just listening to number
one an ample wall needs at least four
layers of bricks and um rate it's rate
of speech and Pitch variation on the
10-point scales listed here so for rate
of speech we're going to go from 10
which would correspond to very fast all
the way down to one which would be mean
not not very
fast um you will also rate how much the
you think the person varies the pitch of
their voice when they're speaking from
one no pitch variation to 10 extremely
variable pitch um you know if these if
this was a real experiment I would think
a little bit harder about these scales
and the labels um you know you should
never just sort of use labels casually
in rating experiments I've never used
these labels before and I'm not in love
with them but you we got to get this
homework assignment assigned so forgive
me for having less elegant labels for
these so then you're going to go through
and make those perceptual ratings for
all 20 of these sentences and you'll see
if you look through the um nuts and
bolts of the assignment that I think
it's a good idea in fact why don't you
just do it why don't I just say it um
copy the tables from you know this uh
canvas assignment into a a Word document
or a Google Document or an open Office
document um because I'd like you to be
I'm asking you to hand in these ratings
um as well as the objective measures
we'll talk about in a second all right
so now you've gone through and you've
made your 20 ratings and now it's time
to do some objective measurements of
rate of speech and um Pitch variation so
the way that we're going to measure rate
of speech is in syllables per second
there are lots of ways that you can
measure rate of speech syllables per
second words per second um all of them
have their pluses and their minuses um
syllables per second is um is in my
opinion sort of the well certainly the
easiest to use one of the easiest to use
you know if you're talking about words
per second you have to worry about
different texts having some words that
are just inherently longer than others
um although you could say the same about
syllables but but I digress all right
let me just scroll back up
here yeah make sure I didn't miss
anything there okay so um how are you g
to make these well the syllables per
second measure um because everybody is
saying the same sentence and let's
listen list to it an ample wall needs at
least four layers of bricks an ample
wall needs at least four layers of
bricks 12 syllables so everybody is
going to have the same number of
syllables but the duration um that they
say those syllables in is going to vary
so really your task here um in measuring
rate of speech is to measure sentence
duration how you going to do that well
you'll Click on each one of these files
you'll do this um one by one in the file
you'll Click on each one of these files
and then have um click on view and edit
so it's got to be highlighted click on
view and edit and whatever comes up in
your prop window it's probably going to
look a little bit different um because I
use prop so often it doesn't
automatically go to the defaults that
would come up if you had just downloaded
prop for example um but one thing is you
you probably will see by default um the
waveform and the spectrogram U but the
spectrogram might look quite a bit
different um your you know you can
change some of the settings for example
if you wanted to just look at a narrower
frequency range um you could change this
to say 5,000 and now we're just looking
at the lowest 5,000 um you could go much
higher than that if you want to see a
bigger frequency range I believe these
were sampled at 44.1 khz as a sampling
rate um so you probably aren't going to
be able to see anything over 22.05 kertz
um as per Nyquist theorem that we've
talked about in class and we'll continue
to talk about at nausea all right so how
are you going to make these duration
measures well you might just look at
this and and look at this uh you might
look at this window and look at the part
down here that says 3.11 seconds and say
well that was easy all I had to do was
look in the window but we have a little
bit of padding on the beginning and the
end here so uh at the beginning here
there's some silence a little bit for
those who haven't worked with Pro yet
which probably many of you so don't feel
like you're behind if you haven't um
take a little bit of time to get um
familiar with Pro uh if you want to
listen to Simply uh if you want to
listen to subsets of the sentence you
can highlight them in the waveform and
then click this box here that's just
that
interval come on M
M
M um all right so how are we going to
make these measurements um what I want
you to do first is to find the beginning
of uh of the first word so it's uh an
ample an ample wall um an is the first
word so to look at where that starts we
can actually select this and then click
seel which will Zoom to the selection
and try and find here and it should
hopefully be not too terribly unclear
for each of these sentences where um the
first U instance of vocalization of
speech begins um you'll see in the uh
rubric for this assignment I have um a
some guideline or I have some criteria
for accuracy of measurements but the
criteria are like 40 milliseconds within
plus or minus 40 milliseconds so I don't
want anybody to to sort of sweat whether
or not the beginning of speech is here
or here or here or here um as I'm moving
the cursor around because those are
those are going to fall well within the
acceptable range of eror of the
acceptable margin of error for this
assignment I kind of like the first
click that I had because it was a nice
round number it was about 0.12
five so so if I were you um for sentence
number one and that's actually one of
your sentences so you might as well just
do as I say is I'd say the start of that
sentence is at 0.125 seconds and that
just means there's 0.125 seconds of um
silence before it or not sentence
silence and background noise so we've
zoomed in there and let's go into our
table um that's one of the things that
we're going to need to calculate the
duration of the spoken sentence so it
begins at
0.125 where does it end well let's click
on all here to zoom out to see the
entire sentence and let's go to the end
let's zoom into the selection here
um finding the end of the sentence is
going to be a little harder than finding
the beginning of the sentence and part
of that is because at the end of the
sentences some people have an extra
exhale so at the end of a sentence you
might have and is not speech right so
for this sentence
um at least four layers of bricks so
this last word is
bricks
bricks um I would look for the end of
this frication interval here the end of
this sort of blob of noise at the end
that corresponds to the S the voiceless
alular
fricative um
again you want to give yourself a little
bit of Grace here we've got you know a
little bit of allowable slop in these
measurements um on this one here uh G
listen to it again there's a
bricks there's a bricks so this little
acoustic event here I don't think that's
part of the S I think that's actually
sort of a noise at the end um but just
for the sake of it being a really clear
acoustic Landmark you you might want to
choose choose this one you could also go
back and choose something that's closer
to kind of the end of the frickative
here and you might want to try it a
little and just listen you know you can
listen to the to the left of the cursor
by clicking down on this uh window
here there's a bricks click to the right
of the cursor to listen to what's after
it yeah that doesn't even sound like
speech that sounds like somebody
clicking a key on a a keyboard or
something
so I'm actually going to go with where
the cursor is right now so that's 2.88 s
seconds I'm just going to the the third
decimal place and not worrying about the
rounding rule um so 2.88 s is the end of
that so if 2.88 s is the end and 0.125
is the beginning the duration of the
sentence in seconds is just the
difference between them I'm not going to
to show my bad mental math again um as I
already have multiple times this
semester so if you wanted to get the
duration of this sentence it would be
2.88 7 minus
.125 whatever that difference is that's
the duration of the sentence in seconds
if you want to figure out the rate of
speech in syllables per second um we'll
do it let's do the um Pitch variation
calculations so let me so we will in a
second I will um remind you how to do
the uh syllables per second calculation
but while we're in the um crout window
here let's look at pitch variations so
if we want to see fundamental frequency
we go under the pitch menu and select
show pitch so what you're seeing down
here in blue is the um Pro estimate of
what the fundamental frequency is at
every moment in time and this uses the
autocorrelation algorithm that's in
section 2.3 of the reading for module 2
and that we talked about in class and
this autocorrelation uh F0 is perfect a
perfectly fine estimate to use for this
particular exercise there are going to
be some cases where it gets it wrong and
um we'll look at one in just a second
but let's finish um number one first
let's finish pov1 first so this is
showing you the estimate of the
fundamental frequency and if you want to
get the since we're looking at
fundamental frequency range we want to
get the Min and the max the minimum and
the maximum because the fundamental
frequency range is just going to be the
difference between those the maximum
subtracted by the Min the minimum
subtracted from the maximum and prod
already makes that very easy for you
because under pitch we can just select
get maximum pitch oops we have to select
something actually with our cursor so
here we'll select the sentence now it
should work get maximum pitch here it
gives gave us a maximum of 165 Hertz f0o
I keep Pro says pitch we I I should be
correcting it in saying f0o instead of
pitch fundamental frequency F0
we perceive it as pitch but actual pitch
is slightly different and outside the
scope of this course so 165 Hertz is the
maximum if we go into that same
selection and get the
minimum that's 80 so our pitch range is
just going to be 165 minus
80 okay sorry I had a little cough there
so I had to mute it all right so we've
got our pitch Max imum and Pitch minimum
and from that we can get our pitch range
in this case uh it was 165 minus 80 um
to get our rate in syllables per second
we have our entire sentence duration
which um I forgot what that is but it's
2 point something 2.7 something um and
because we're doing this in syllables
per second we and there are 12 syllables
in the sentence we want to take that
duration and divide it by 12 that's
going to give give us the average um
syllables per second average rate of
speech in syllables per second and I
don't want to do those calculations for
you I mean they're kind of um
straightforward calculations but um I
want to make sure that you get as much
practice as possible in this exercise so
I'm not going to actually do those
calculations for you plus if I try and
do them in my head we'll end up with
another 145 time 2 uh event all right so
that's very straightforward one there
was um
nothing weird about the the um fzo
estimate let's look at at O2 here
because if I remember correctly the um
Pitch tracker the f-zero estimator
doesn't do as good a job for this person
as for
o1 right so first of all this person has
a much um lower fzero right and if we
listen to this we can hear it as lower
PCH an ample wall needs at least four
layers of bricks what if we select this
whole what if we do the the very same
thing that we did before um select the
entire um Cent and go in and get minimum
pitch here it's about 75 which is quite
low um but if we get maximum pitch look
it gives us 498 so 498 is right at the
very top of what can be estimated by Pro
and if we look that 498 is just a little
jump here in uh the middle of the
sentence and that's probably a well
probably why am I being so koi um that
is definitely a case where the pitch
tracker has failed um pov2 did not
suddenly have a jump in in fzo up to 500
HZ I mean 500 HZ is very high kind of
toward the limits of what a human can
produce as a fundamental frequency so if
it really was a 500 htz fundamental
frequency it would sound very jarring
instead this is just a case where the
fundamental frequency estimate is wrong
so what are you GNA do in cases like
this well what I would like you to do is
to go in in cases like this and find
where you think the actual maximum the
maximum correctly tracked pitch is think
in this case the the lower bound the 75
Hertz I trust that right um but what is
the maximum well if we look at you know
where there are not jumps these two
things here are these big jumps that are
not consistent with the rest you know
probably the maximum non- jumped F0 is
here around 134 Hertz so for this person
you know it's a little bit tougher
because there's going to be a judgment
call that you have to make I would um
count this person's maximum F0 is 134
their minimum is 75 and I would
calculate the difference of that as the
um the pitch range for this person the
f-zero range um just to give you another
example of finding the beginning and the
end of the
sentence i' put the beginning of the
sentence here at around
time1 seconds
and the end which I promised you would
be a little tougher or a little less
straightforward I'd put that at about
2582 and remember once again the
criteria that we're going to use in the
grading gives you about 40 milliseconds
of slop on either end so you don't have
to worry about being perfect but be you
know
conscientious um so first time we've
done this homework assignment uh it's
you know there are 20 sentences that
you're going to make two ratings of um
perceptually and then two calculations
of with pitch range and um rate of
speech in syllables per second um and
you'll see in looking at the description
of the assignment that um you're going
to compare your ratings with the
objective measures and answer a few
interpretation questions as well and
we'll talk about it more in class on
September 26th just two days from now
because I'm recording this Sunday
afternoon all right so I'm going to stop
sharing here and stop recording I hope
this is
useful bye