Spectrograms
Philippe Martin · 2021
The spectrogram, together with the melody analyzer, is the preferred tool of phoneticians for the acoustic analysis of speech. Segmentation by phoneme and by word is thus the result of a transfer of formal knowledge, derived from writing and imposed on phoneticians and speech signal processing specialists by most linguistic theories. The principle of segmentation by alignment with synthetic speech is based on the forced alignment of the recording to be segmented with the text-to-speech synthesis of the annotated text. Syllabic and telephone segmentation is a recurrent activity in speech research and development, which, until recently, was carried out manually on relatively short recordings. However, manual segmentation carried out by visual inspection of spectrograms by trained experts is a very long process, not only requiring expertise in acoustics but also in the phonetic and phonological specificities of the language under consideration.