UCL PSYCHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE SCIENCES
Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL  |  PALS  |  Resources in Speech, Hearing & Phonetics

Videos in Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences

The Fry-Denes speech recogniser at UCL

A short film describing perhaps the first electronic speech recognition system. It was developed by Denis Fry and Peter Denes at University College London in th 1950s.

Phonetic laboratory instruments of the 1920s

A clip showing instruments from a phonetics laboratory in the 1920s, from 35mm nitrate footage in the UCL Phonetics Film Collection. A kymograph is shown being used to analyse an utterance of the word "potato". The speaker using the kymograph mask is probably Stephen Jones (1872 - 1942), superintendent of the UCL Phonetics Laboratory from its foundation until 1937. A second short sequence shows a sensitive flame (a gas flame adjusted to so as to respond selectively to sound). The speaker (so far unidentified) appears to be articulating various sibilant fricatives; the flame dips on some, but not others. Vocal-tract diagrams are visible on the wall behind the speaker, showing that the location is a phonetics classroom or laboratory.

Some other pages on our site you may enjoy:

ESECTION - Speech signal cross-sections

ESection is a free program for calculating and displaying spectral and other related analyses of sections of a speech signal. It can be used to demonstrate the different spectral properties of elements of speech. It can also calculate an LPC spectrum, autocorrelation and cepstrum analyses, and can display the signal as a waveform or as a spectrogram. It automatically finds formant and fundamental frequency values. More information.

CochSim - Cochlear Simulation teaching tool

CochSim is a dynamic simulation of the time and frequency analysis performed by the ear. Sound signals such as sinewaves, pulse trains, sawtooth waves and vowels can be fed into an auditory filterbank and the output monitored in a moving animated display. The program shows the vibration of the oval window and the basilar membrane, the haircell activity against filter frequency and time, and an average excitation pattern across the cochlea. More information.