Speech Envelope and Acoustic Landmarks

Extracts various amplitude envelopes using different procedures from the speech rhythm literature and detects signals within the envelope.

About

This package extracts one of four different speech envelopes from the raw speech wave form, and then looks for discrete events (e.g., lower crossings, peaks) within the signal. By combining amongst the envelopes and events, the user can generate different acoustic landmarks with which to analyse speech rhythm, or use as a time series for correlating with neural signals in speech perception experiments.

In addition to these primary functions, a flexible windowing tool is included. It finds natural silent break points within a desired range (e.g., 4 +/- 2 seconds in duration) to break long audio down into shorter segments.

Usage

Use acousticLandmarks.m as a starting point and run with included example.wav to see how the package works.

Additional Contributions:

Envelope 3 is adapted from Oganian, Y., & Chang, E. F. (2019). A speech envelope landmark for syllable encoding in human superior temporal gyrus. Science advances, 5(11).

Envelope 4 is adapted from Tilsen, S., & Arvaniti, A. (2013). Speech rhythm analysis with decomposition of the amplitude envelope: characterizing rhythmic patterns within and across languages. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134(1), 628-639.