Realtime and interactive tools for speech and hearing science education

Recent advances of computational power and software foundations make it possible to introduce interactive and realtime tools in speech and hearing science education with relatively low cost. The tool, SparkNG (Speech Production and Auditory perception Research Kernel, Next Generation) consists of four applications. They are (a) real-time FFT analyzer with interactive spectrogram, (b) real-time display of FFT spectrogram (narrow-band and wide-band) and auditory (ERB, Bark and 1/3 octave) spectrogram, (c) real-time vocal tract shape visualizer, and (d) interactive speech production simulator enabling vocal tract shape and transfer function manipulation with aliasing-free L-F model (Kawahara et al., 2015 APSIPA) manipulation. The tool is useful for teachers to demonstrate underlying concepts in an intuitive and attractive manner. It also is useful for researchers to check their ideas quickly. MATLAB source codes of the constituent functions are open to everyone. A compiled MATLAB license-free version is also available. [This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP16K12464.]