The Measurement of Speech Power

Abstract : The measurement of speech power is basic to research on the acoustic correlates of linguistic stress. Two units essential to speech power measurement are a rectifier and a filter. An amplitude compressor is also desirable. Theoretically a square-law rectifier is ideally suited for speech power measurements, but there are considerable practical difficulties in implementing such a circuit. The common 'linear rectifier' has been found experimentally to be suitable for this application. A simple filter design may be achieved which is adequate for most applications and which avoids the theoretical and practical difficulties of several other filter designs discussed. Logarithmic amplitude compression of the filter output is desirable and is easily accomplished with a diode. (Author)