Techniques in Speech Acoustics

Contents of the CD-ROM

The CD-ROM which accompanies this book contains software, speech data-bases and a set of exercises that allow you to explore the techniques described in the text.

The CD-ROM contains four subdirectories (folders):

archive: contains an archive of possibly useful software, in particular, a mirror of the Xlisp-Stat software distribution which contains versions of Xlisp-Stat for Unix and Macintosh platforms.
dbase: contains seven separate speech databases containing over 400Mb of labelled speech data for use in the exercises and in your own research. Details of the databases are given on the CD-ROM web pages.
html: contains the web pages giving installation instructions and other information as well as the worksheets and documentation for the software included on the CD-ROM. All of these pages are accessed through the toplevel file techniq.htm.
software: contains software to be installed on your computer. This consists of two main packages: the Emu speech database system, which allows labelling and searching of speech databases; and Xlisp-Stat, which you will use for various demonstrations and for statistical analysis of speech data.

See the file readme.txt on the CD-ROM for details of how to install and run the software.

System Requirements

Two software packages are provided on the CDROM: Xlisp-Stat and the Emu speech database system. Xlisp-Stat will run on both Windows (3.1, 95, 98 or NT), Macintosh and Unix systems while the Emu system currently only runs on Windows (95, 98 or NT) and Unix. You will be able to do many of the exercises with only Xlisp-Stat, but some labelling and speech data analysis exercises require Emu.

For the Emu software we recommend a Pentium or better processor running Windows 95/98 or Windows NT with at least 16MB of RAM. The software requires 15Mb of free disk space for installation; you should have around an extra 5Mb free for temporary files while you are working on the worksheets. Since the speech databases and web pages remain on the CD-ROM you will need to keep the CD-ROM in your computer while you work on the exercises. A sound card is required for audio playback.

Versions of Xlisp-Stat are included on the CDROM for various models of Macintosh system. Installation requires about 5Mb of free disk space on your computer.

The software also runs on Unix (Solaris and Linux) computers. To obtain these versions, and information about new releases, please see our web site http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/techniques.