Peer Review

Whistle speech

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Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: This is a for profit website sponsored by Haskin Laboratories. The purpose suggested by the contributor has a solid educational application as described. The pseudo spectrograms are supported by easily played and re-played synthesized audio files. The audio files feature the removal of consonant sounds leaving vowel harmonics for acoustic comparisons at the short sentence level. Links are available to descriptions of speech perception studies.
Type of Material:: A simulation/demonstration that includes a web site featuring flash player based audio, html diagrams/spectrograms and written descriptions.
Recommended Uses:: This material could be highly effective in the context of acoustic analysis as part of a speech-science or voice course curriculum at either undergraduate or graduate levels. Students could listen to the sentences and identify what acoustic cues are present for each sentence. A good lab assignment.
Technical Requirements:: Quicktime for audio
Identify Major Learning Goals:: There are no stated learning goals other than those inferred by the participant.
Target Student Population:: Undergraduate speech & hearing science course, graduate speech perception course.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: Knowledge of acoustic phonetics and spectrograms.

Rating:
Strengths:: A clear demonstration of the principles of acoustic phonetics including the ability to listen to F1 and F2, F2 and F3, and F1 and F3 separately; a function that demonstrates the importance of F1 and F2 to speech perception. The material also demonstrates abilities and limitations in coping with distorted speech.
Concerns:: The site would benefit from suggested assignments or a question page to lead the user. There is no distinct summary pertaining to the sine wave speech although information about how these concepts are used in research is included in 2-3 different links. The student would need to be familiar with the spectrogram format used in the website diagrams. For instance, students would need to understand narrow and broad-band spectrogram applications for frequency and time constraints. Therefore, additional outside assignments may require further written or video instructions/guides for this to be an effective teaching tool or assignment.

Rating:
Strengths:: There are good descriptions of the differences between a real spectrogram and a sine wave spectrogram. The ability to listen to individual formants is terrific.
Concerns:: Not really designed to be a teaching tool, rather a demonstration of their research. Not a place that neophyte students could go to learn something on their own. No clear educational objective or assignment parameters

Rating:
Strengths:: Listening is intuitive and the links literally say “Play sine wave” and “Play natural speech.” Best used by someone familiar with spectrograms.
Concerns:: Could be more visually appealing.

Other Issues and Comments:: This site is intended to demonstrate research done at Haskins Labs but an instructor could easily design a lab assignment using the demonstration of sine wave sentences.
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