Signal Processing in Speech and Hearing

not applicable

The course includes 4h of weekly in-person instruction, corresponding to a 3h theoretical-practical class and a 1h practical class.
During the theoretical-practical sessions, the course content will be presented, encouraging, whenever possible, active student participation through group activities and discussion. The program contents will be followed by step-by-step problem-solving demonstrations related to these. Finally, the contents will be illustrated with practical examples and demonstrations using Python programming whenever possible.
The practical classes will mostly correspond to practical assignments solving by the students, supervised by the professor as needed, and with particular emphasis on Python programming.

Upon the completion of this course, the students will be able to:
– Describe the properties of signals in both the time and frequency domains and explain their relationship;
– Understand and apply the digital signal processing fundamentals to the analysis of sounds, including speech sounds;
– Understand auditory perception as a signal processing system and relate this knowledge to the functioning of hearing aids;
– Develop basic Python programs which perform audio signal processing operations, particularly involving speech sounds;
– Understand and apply the International Phonetic Alphabet;
– Acoustically and articulatorily classify the sounds of European Portuguese;
– Relate the articulatory characteristics of sounds to their acoustic characteristics, using spectrogram/sonogram analysis.

1. Mathematics:
– Matrix concept;
– Operations with arrays and some properties;
– Convolution;
– Fourier transform.

2. Fundamentals of Signal Processing and Systems:
– Digital vs. analog signals;
– Fundamental concepts of signal processing;
– Description of a non-harmonic signal;
– Modulation and noise;
– Properties of linear and nonlinear systems;

3. Signal processing with Python:
– Introduction to the software and main functions;
– Characterization of different sound file formats, with and without compression;
– Signal acquisition and production;
– Basic operations with audio files;
– FFT and DFT functions;
– Creation of frequency spectra and spectrograms, MFCCs and Honey spectrogram;
– Application of filters.

4. Phonetics:
– International Phonetic Alphabet;
– Articulatory phonetics: articulatory classification of the sounds of European Portuguese;
– Acoustic phonetics: representation of European Portuguese sounds and sonogram analysis.

NAO