Acoustic-based distance calculation

An acoustic-based method that can be used to calculate the distance between pronunciations.

Requirements

• Python 3.6
• PRAAT 6.1.08
• Hidden Markov Toolkit (HTK) 3.4
• FAVE
• R

Getting Started

git clone https://github.com/Bartelds/acoustic-distance-measure.git

Data

Identifiers of the audio samples used can be found in Audio

Data source: http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php

Usage

Before the distances can be computed, the input data must be preprocessed once (step 1:4). This can be done by adhering to the following procedure:

1: Forced-alignment

Input: audio files

Output: aligned .TextGrid files

Forced-alignment

Forced-alignment is introduced to capture the words present inside the audio files. The Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner is used to accomplish the task of forced-alignment.

1. Resample all audio files to 16 KHz mono PCM.
2. Create a transcript file that contains all the words spoken in the audio samples.
3. Run alignment: fa.sh
4. Extract start and end of words: extract_fa.praat
5. Segment paragraphs into words: wavsplitter.py

2: MFCC generation

Generate MFCCs.

MFCC

1. Generate .scp listing that suits your data: example_hcopy.scp
2. Use config.txt with HTK parameters.
3. Generate MFCCs: HCopy -T 1 -C config -S example_hcopy.scp
4. HTK compressed format should be exported: ./exporthtk.sh

3: Acoustic-based distance calculation

Distances are calculated using Dynamic Time Warping.

DTW

1. dtw.R computes the distances (includes normalization).