Introduction to Speech Analysis with FAVE (Forced Alignment & Vowel Extraction)

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Introduction to Speech Analysis with FAVE (Forced Alignment & Vowel Extraction)

By Scottish Graduate School of Social Science

Location

University of Edinburgh

Dugald Stewart Building room 3.10/3.11 Edinburgh EH8 9AD United Kingdom

Description

The Scottish Graduate School of Social Science welcomes postgraduate research students to the following advanced training event:

Introduction to Speech Analysis with FAVE (Forced Alignment & Vowel Extraction)

17 February 2015

University of Edinburgh

This one-day workshop will teach you how to use the computational tool FAVE: Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction. The tool takes a sound file of speech and a word-level transcript of that speech and uses a speech recognizer to match the words in the transcript to the acoustic signal of the speech file, resulting in the automatic generation of a new text file that indicates all the time points for the start and end of every vowel, consonant, noise, and pause, all of which are automatically labelled. A researcher can then use that to automatically extract information about any set of sounds that might be of interest. For example, FAVE also includes a tool to automatically extract the key acoustic measures for vowels, allowing a dialectologist, sociolinguist, forensic linguist, or phonetician to easily quantify accents, dialects, and speaking styles.

This is an essential skill for any current postgraduate student in the aforementioned areas of speech research. However, although there is a web-based interface for the tool, the benefits of using it are very limited compared to the freedom and flexibility a researcher can have by installing the program on their own computer and understanding more about how it functions. This particular Advanced Training event is ideal for all students because the researcher leading the training Dr Fruehwald, is one of the original designers and continuing developers of FAVE.

The day will be comprised of a morning lecture introducing the benefits of learning how to use FAVE, followed by an afternoon clinic helping students learn how to use the program on their own laptops (students will need to bring individual laptops to participate in the event). Students who attend should know the basics about speech science, phonetics, and sociolinguistics. Both MSc and PhD students are encouraged to attend.

Outline for the event:

9:45 -- Welcome & coffee (catered)

10:00 -- Lecture: Introduction to FAVE

  • Why would you want to use FAVE?
  • How does FAVE work?
  • How does FAVE compare with other methods?
  • What do you need to do to get ready to use FAVE?

12:00 -- Lunch (catered)

13:00 -- Workshop:

  • Running FAVE
  • Getting FAVE installed on your laptop (if you haven’t already)
  • Running FAVE-align Running
  • FAVE-extract
  • Interpreting your results

16:00 -- Closing & coffee (catered)

The organiser of this event is Dr Lauren Hall-Lew and further questions can be directed to her at Lauren.Hall-Lew@ed.ac.uk.

Organised by

The Scottish Graduate School of Social Science is the UK's largest facilitator of funding, training and support for doctoral students in social science. By combining the expertise of sixteen universities across Scotland, the school facilitates world-class PhD research. The school is funded jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Scottish Funding Council.

SGSSS is a highly attractive environment for doctoral research. Not only do our partner universities offer an excellent research environment, we also offer comprehensive and world-class research training in a number of discipline-specific and interdisciplinary pathways. In addition, the school manages a programme of advanced training courses and an annual summer school which together offers our students further opportunities to develop their research, knowledge exchange and transferable professional skills.

At the heart of the SGSSS is the Doctoral Training Partnership (formerly the Doctoral Training Centre) in Scotland. The SGSSS was established in 2011 and is the biggest of 14 Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) accredited DTPs in the United Kingdom. The bid for renewed funding has been successful and from 1 October 2017 the SGSSS will be one of the ESRC's 14 Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTP)

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