Customer Reviews

Signals and Systems for Speech and Hearing

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If you read this book, it should be somewhere after the first but not much beyond the second or third work you tackle on acoustic phonetics. If you read it too early, you probably won't get what is meant by 'systems' in this context, or their relevance to acoustic phonetics and speech processing; if you read it too late, you will have already learned most of the material elsewhere.

Topics covered in this volume include: properties of sinusoid waves; LTI (linear time-invariant) systems; amplitude responses; frequency, period, and phase (this book offers greater coverage of phase than most books of its kind); the dB scale; systems that filter sound signals, like the ear and the vocal tract; spectra and spectrograms; and digitization of signals: quantization, sampling, aliasing, and reconversion to analogue.

This book is not an introduction to acoustic phonetics, and it does not go into great detail on any one topic; it attempts, rather, to provide reader-friendly technical background on many of the central concepts and tools of acoustic phonetics to non-engineering types, and to help the reader feel more comfortable with them. There are exercises at the end of each chapter which I generally found more difficult than mastering the chapter content, but they are useful in determining how well you grasped the material.

I wouldn't call this book an absolute must-read, but it's a leisurely way to review key concepts of acoustic phonetics and pick up a few new ones on the way.