This project was completed as part of a senior design project at Ohio University in 2014.

Brian Evans

— Ohio University School of Dance, Film, and Theater - Assistant Professor of Performance

Natalie Yarnell

— Ohio University Russ College of Engineering and Technology - Computer Science

Patrick Gray

— Ohio University Russ College of Engineering and Technology - Computer Science

Mick Koch

— Ohio University Russ College of Engineering and Technology - Computer Science

As an Assistant Professor of Voice and Speech in the School of Theater at Ohio University I am interested in developing software to further our educational mission and share with the larger academic community. I have used phonetics and the IPA’s vowel chart to demonstrate vowel shifts for the instruction of speech for many years, and I have wanted to see more tools that demonstrate these principles for quite some time. I have been familiar with programs such as Dr. Speech and Sona-Match by Kay Pentax, but these programs are geared towards speech therapy, and my needs are more specifically didactic and artistic. My goal is to develop and expand this approach to the visualization of vowels that may prove to be invaluable to the training of professional artists.

I teach speech and dialects to actors, and I believe this tool could offer much to our curricula. Specifically, the use of vowels for particular dialects or accents could be clarified with visual demonstration of sample recordings. The student actors could then have the opportunity in real time to experiment with vowel substitutions in the context of speech in order to produce similar vowel patterns to the desired accent. Vocal tract posture is a key component in my teaching of accents, and visualizing placement patterns of vowels could be extremely helpful with student outcomes. Fundamental vowel identification in our work with speech helps students recognize patterns in their own accent, and again, the visual representation of this could further my ability to help the students’ progress.

— Brian Evans

• Ability to record and display F1-F2 plots in real-time.
• Ability to place phonetic symbols anywhere on the chart for reference points and target vowels.
• Ability to place a vowel quadrilateral over the chart to give a relative orientation of target vowels.
• An inverted x and y axis to give speakers a "right-side-up" display of vowel production.
• A linear wave recording in the same pane as the vowel display in order to review specific vowels for comparison and analysis.
• Mac and PC versions.

— Brian Evans

At the start of the semester, we were introduced to Brian Evans' idea for a real-time formant software. We were provided with a brief introduction to the theory regarding formants, along with a C library that contained the functions to calculate formants. With this information, we assembled as a team and began research into the development of such a project. It was our responsibility to make use of the given C library and redesign the code to work with any other code we stumbled upon or developed ourselves. This document provides insight into the four month long development process of the VowelCat software.

A person's voice is comprised of many frequencies that all work to formulate the vowels and consonants heard in speech. Lower frequencies are interpreted as vowel sounds, while higher frequencies create the consonants. The pattern of such frequencies varies from person to person, which ultimately leads to the formulation of distinguishable accents. Accents are typically measured by the lower frequencies of a voice. Thus, accent training revolves around manipulating vowel sounds.

Vowel sounds are formulated from the positioning of one's tongue, lips, and jaw. An open jaw and compressed tongue help to shape the 'æ' that may be heard in the word cat. One could transition to the 'ɔɪ' sound, as heard in the word boy, simply by puckering his or her lips. Such processes seem intuitive, yet it is often the case that people have trouble emulating an accent when learning a new language. Such people seek the help of teachers and textbooks to learn the mouth movements and understand the sounds. With a new age of technological advancements, software has taken on a major role in linguistics. VowelCat is one such software that aims to guide peoples' accents through real time voice graphing.

VowelCat records and digitizes a user's voice. The data is immediately transferred to a formant processing function that will extract the frequencies associated with vowel sounds. These frequencies are plotted on a formant phonetic chart, which professional linguists have designed in an attempt to visualize accents. It is assumed that the real-time actions of this software will allow people to gradually correct their accents in one fluid movement, rather than having to wait for evaluation, from possibly a teacher, after physically practicing. This software also provides file saving an opening, giving users an opportunity to review past training sessions.

• libaudio written from scratch and leveraging the portaudio library

  The Vowel Formant Analyzer utilizes the open source audio I/O library PortAudio. This C written API executes low level functions to capture recordings from a microphone. At a 44100 Hz sampling rate, a high quality digital sound wave may be extracted from a user’s voice. This extraction is stored in a fixed sized ring buffer. The ring buffer’s architecture allows for a continuous, asynchronous recording. Much like an assembly line, one processing thread stores the recorded samples in the buffer, while another unloads the data for formant conversion, all at a low cost to memory.

• libformant adapted from Snack C source code

  Formant conversion involves a series of mathematical computations that have been abstracted away by the Snack Sound Toolkit. This open source C library provides numerous audio processing and sound visualization functions, useful for sound analysis software such as the Vowel Formant Analyzer. While the underlying code is written in C, all functions have been wrapped within Tcl and Python scripting to provide a simple command driven interaction. Unfortunately, such functionality was unnecessary overhead for the Vowel Formant Analyzer, thus much time was spent extracting and reconfiguring the code into a few, simple C files of formant functions.

• GUI written in C++ using the Qt framework

  The user interface of the Vowel Formant Analyzer must perform several tasks. Most prominently, it must continuously take formant values calculated from the audio captured by the microphone and plot them on a graph. To give this data some context, symbols representing the formant value of the outer edge of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are included by default. The IPA is a system of phonetic notation that represents standardized sounds of oral language. Since the primary purpose of this application is to assist actors and actresses in perfecting accents, including these vowel symbols gives them a scientific way of verifying that they are making the correct sounds. In addition to plotting the most recent points based on audio data, we also continue to plot two or three previous points on the graph. By altering the opacity and size of these 'tracers', we try to give the user some primitive biofeedback to assist them in seeing how small variations in their voice can affect the resulting formant values.

  The user is also able to add additional symbols and move those symbols around. While this removes the correlation between the symbols, their plot positions and the IPA, this allows users to create their own configurations to practice specific accent profiles, for example. There is also support for recording and manipulating audio files. This allows the user to record audio that demonstrates a specific accent profile and then share that with other users.

  The user interface is written using a framework called Qt, which is itself written in C++. Qt is an application framework and widget toolkit that allows for easy creation of GUI's. Additionally, Vowel Formant Analyzer also uses a 3rd party plotting widget called QCustomPlot to manage plotting the data in real time.

VowelCat utilizes an elaborate Makefile build system to compile and link all source code. The underlying libraries are organized into their respective files, each provided with a minimal Makefile. The parent directory contains a first level Makefile that recursively compiles the source code, setting up any necessary directives along the way, ultimately leaving the developer with an executable located in a newly created directory build/VowelCat. Various commands, such as a debug enable option, may be issued to the build system. Clean up is as simple as typing 'make clean'.

Depending on the distro, you may need to install the following packages:

• gcc-4.7
• g++-4.7
• qt4
• libasound2-dev

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install gcc-4.7 g++-4.7 qt4 libasound2-dev
$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.6 60 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.6
$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.7 40 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.7
$ sudo update-alternatives --config gcc
$ sudo update-alternatives --config g++
$ make
$ ./build/vowelcat

The following build command statically links all external libraries to produce one independent executable to run on any Mac or Windows computer.

$ make release

• There is no pitch detection, so female voices don't tend to work very well.
• Users cannot freely change audio settings (e.g. sample rate, channels, ).
• Users cannot select their input nor output device within program.
• There is only one accent profile implemented (though adding more is a more or less straightforward process).
• The spectrogram has a fixed width.

• Evaluation of a New Beam-Search Formant Tracking Algorithm in Noisy Environments
• VOCAL TRACT RESONANCES TRACKING BASED ON VOICED AND UNVOICED SPEECH CLASSIFICATION USING DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING AND FIXED INTERVAL KALMAN SMOOTHER
• Developments of the Research of the Formant Tracking Algorithm
• A NEW STRATEGY OF FORMANT TRACKING BASED ON DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING
• Control Methods Used in a Study of the Vowels
• Acoustic characteristics of American English Vowels

• We have to disable particular buttons while others are enabled. For example the record button is disabled while a file is opened because we do not allow editing of audio files. This tradeoff is necessary because we do no yet have the GUI features to make the whole process of editing intuitive.