A Graphical Speech Analysis Teaching Tool

The widespread use of digital speech processing in today's technologies causes many electronics and computer engineering students to need a basic background in these subjects. The paper describes a toolbox designed to support undergraduate or graduate level courses on speech processing. The proposed educational toolbox is designed as a virtual lab for basic operations in digital speech processing-based courses. This graphical user interface (GUI) based speech analysis algorithm is built with six main function modules, which are signal input, noise addition, up-sampling/down-sampling, time domain feature analysis, pitch detection and frequency domain analysis. The toolbox involves different operations for measuring important speech feature parameters such as pitch, energy, zero-crossing ratio, FFT and power spectrum of an input speech signal. The toolbox has also been developed to easily manipulate and add some other possible speech processing methods. It is thought that the tool will make it easier for students to understand the methods that form the basis of digital speech processing, increase the interest in the lesson with its visual outputs, and allow new methods to be added easily when desired thanks to its simple and modular structure. The main aim of this paper to show how such a tool facilitates students understanding of technical concepts introduced in speech courses.