In our day-to-day spoken communication, we listen to speech in varying acoustic environments. To decipher the speech signal accurately we ignore any variations caused by the environment while picking up on important acoustic cues such as, timing, pitch. Each language employs these acoustic features differently, for example, te reo Māori has vowel length contrasts, tonal languages like Mandarin and Cantonese use pitch to differentiate between words. Even the way we distinguish between sounds like /k/ and /g/, /t/ and /d/ are different across different languages.
In this project, we will examine how distortion from different acoustic environments affects our psychoacoustics (e.g., our abilities to differentiate timing and pitch) and speech perception to understand how we decode speech in real-world environments.
This project will utilise audio VR to create an application to test how we perceive different speech sounds. The project will involve taking acoustic measurements, developing a software platform for testing using virtual acoustics, and conducting experiments using the platform developed.
Student suitable for this project should be interested in linguistics, acoustics, and VR audio technologies. Reasonable familiarity with MATLAB or Python programming is recommended.
Undergraduate
As this project requires fundamental knowledge in digital signal processing, at least one of the group members must have passed MECHENG370 Electronics and Signal Processing and MECHENG313 Design of Real-time Software Systems (i.e. the team must have at least one Mechatronics student).
Taking MECHENG726 in Part4 S2 would help students understand theories and techniques useful for the project (enrollment is NOT a requirement).
Familiarity with, and/or an interest to learn about:
Auditory perception / speech perception
Second language acquisition
Research and data collection
Phonetics
Acoustics Lab (City 422.154, Lab)