Speech Therapy Project

     Student: James Richards  (MEng final  year)
Supervisor: Dr P.J.Leonard

Training ExamplesProject aims

The goal of the project was to develop a system that provides visual feedback on a users voice. One use of the system could be in speech therapy as a additional learning tool. Users will learn from clear visual feedback how to adjust their vocal tract and lips to more closely imitate the ideal vowel sound.

How it works

 The system  uses a voice recognition algorithm that has been 'trained' on a number of peoples voices. The computer learns the characteristics of the sound presented (using a neural net).  Once trained it can be used to provide a comparison against any new input voices.

Training Set

Training data was obtained by recording 12 different people saying the following phonemes:

   AHH     father
   EEE       flee
   EHH      bed   
   UHH     burn
   ERR      grrreat
   OOH     blue

Visual Feedback

 The program classifies the sound the user is making and provides instant visual feedback via on-screen graphics.
A simplified diagram of the vocal tract is morphed in real-time.

Demo

  Because the project software was written in JAVA so it is possible to run the program from a browser.  You will need to have a microphone in order to use the program.  Some cheap microphones can be quite noisy. For this application the Logitech USB Desktop Microphone seems to work quite well (about 15 pounds from amazon) .  The applet runs as a group of floating windows.   Note the program will exit if you don't have a micrphone connected!

    CLICK HERE FOR DEMO


Comments or questions?  Please contact p.j.leonard@bath.ac.uk 

More music / speech projects.