The SpeechMark MATLAB Toolbox

The SpeechMark family of products detects and measures acoustic landmarks —acoustic events that correlate with changes in speech articulation. Landmarks are useful for investigating non-lexical attributes of speech, such as differences in production of the same speech material by the same speaker under different conditions.

The SpeechMark MATLAB Toolbox Product adds acoustic landmark support to the MATLAB omputational environment. It comes complete with comprehensively documented code, sample data files, and demo scripts.

Features

The SpeechMark Toolbox:

• Computation of pitch tracks, “cepstrograms,” and band energy envelopes within speech signals;
• Automatic detection of both abrupt and maximal acoustic landmarks in speech;
• Post-processing of generated landmark sequences into a “syllable” structure which reveals something about the complexity of the utterances in the source, including voiced regions (within which pitch measurements are meaningful), and certain “pseudo-speech” regions which can be classified as non-speech noise.
• Generation of landmark-related plots and images;
• Generation of a standard MATLAB .mat (binary) file containing information about detected landmarks, amplitude envelope, and other signal contours and attributes;
• Generation of a standard SpeechMark “.lm” file containing information about detected landmarks;
• Tools for processing real time audio streams and generating acoustic landmarks in real time;
• Comprehensive toolbox documentation compatible with the MATLAB Supplemental Software browser, including a roadmap page, example scripts and output files, and function pages;
• Invocation of the MATLAB Imaging Toolbox, when available, to speed up computations.

System Requirements:

One of the following operating systems:

• Windows 10, Apple OSX (Mountain Lion or later);
• An installed copy of MATLAB (version R2017b or newer);
• An installed copy of the MATLAB Signal Processing Toolbox and, optionally, Image Processing Toolbox.

Potential Enhancements:

• A GUI-based demo, so that the end user can quickly get a feel for the various parameters and how they affect the processing/result;
• A user control that will allow a user to specify features of the landmarks-in-waveform plot to be included or removed.

Screen Shots to be displayed in Product documentation:

• Landmarks-in-waveform plot;
• Vowel space plot.

Downloads

• Click here to download this SpeechMark product.