A computer-based course in spectrogram reading

We describe a computer-based course in spectrogram reading built with the CSLU Toolkit. The principal teaching tool is SpeechView, a Toolkit component that allows students to interact with speech waveform files, spectrograms, and labels. These capabilities are essential for a course in spectrogram reading. Other Toolkit modules bring additional capabilities to the course: (1) an animated face allows students to view articulators; (2) a speech synthesis system enables students to compare human and synthesized speech; and (3) a phonetic alignment package performs automatic labeling of speech. The authors have used these software components to teach three computer-based classes. We have also developed a complete laboratory curriculum, including a speech corpus designed for beginning spectrogram reading. In this article we describe the curriculum and associated speech corpus. We conclude by describing our work toward an entirely computer-based course in spectrogram reading, including: (1) enhanced spectrogram displays, (2) new labeling tools, and (3) online text, graphics, and exercises.