Sound Panel Display Buttons

The Sound Panel display buttons visibly show a recorded sound in different formats.The most useful format is the time domain wave display because you can easily to see word boundaries.

Time Doman  Pressing this button displays how a sound vibrates air over time. This format is the most useful for editing sound waves. It is the default way that we display sound recordings.
Spectrograph  Sound waves consist of many frequencies that combine to make a sound. An analogy is a person throwing many rocks into a pool. The pattern of waves that result are a combination of all the different patterns. Each rock represents one frequency. The spectrograph shows the frequencies vertically on the display. The lowest frequencies show at the bottom; the highest freqencies show at the top. The darker colors represent frequencies that are louder. You can see word boundaries with the spectrograph display, but they are sometimes not very distinct.
Frequency Domain  The frequency domain displays shows the frequencies over a particular selection. The low frequencies show to the left, and the high frequencies show to the right. The loudness displays vertically; louder frequencies display higher in the window display.

This display format will help us implement speech recognition capabilities. For example, you might record a vowel sound, like ah, and display the sound in the time domain. When you zoom in, You will see a reqularly repeating pattern. The frequency domain shows which sound frequencies combine to create this pattern.

The frequency domain is for display only. The HARE audio editor disables the ability to select or zoom when you are in this mode. Just click on the spectrograph or time domain display buttons to restore the HARE audio editor to its normal mode.

Feature Vector Display  The speech display performs the front end calculations over a recorded speech signal and displays the results visually. Essentially, the program divides the recording into a series of overlapping windows and performs some complicated algorithms. The result is a feature vector of numbers for each window. These numbers display each in a different color. In this way you can analyze how the feature vector changes over time.

This function is useful as a research platform as we continue to prepare the ACORNS program to be able handle speech recognition applications. When this is done, you will be able to speak in your native tongue to get the ACORNS program to respond. Speech recognition capabilities will enable us to build all sorts of games that will facilitate language learning.