Speech Technology Books

This book is a fantastic "how-to" on the use of technology in the voice studio, and a fascinating treatise on the need for cooperation between speech pathologists and vocal pedagogues (teachers of singing). Using comprehensive examples, step-by-step methodology, and a wonderful multimedia CD-ROM, Nair makes this material accessible to everyone -- even the computing novice. The writing can be somewhat informal and a bit too familiar at times, but it gets results. I've employed these methods in my own studio, and can vouch for the new depth that this visual stimulus can bring to the studio.

I am a serious amateur singer, and have read many books on singing. This is the book we needed. It discuses singing and tone production in terms of real, physical adjustments, verifiable with the included voice spectrograph, rather than mystical exhortations to "make the tone come out of the top of your head" type of instructions. The major components of correct tone production are discussed, along with the major vocal flaws. The vocal flaws are identified, their causes clarified, and corrective actions recommended. This is the diamond in the gravel, don't leave home without it!

i bought this product but the dvd that came with it is not playing on my pc or my dvd player.so not satisfied and the book does not explain details.

The price was low, the shipping was quick; the transaction was perfect.
thank you

This book has been very helpful in giving me an introduction into the Pro Tools software. Pro Tools isn't the only DAW out there, but it is the industry standard. If you're looking to make a career in music production, I highly recommend this book as a place to start.

Cool for beginners to learn shortcuts for basic operations, editing etc. Nice projects on dvd to work with, but I thought it would be more detailed concerning the use of plugins, routing and advanced stuff.

Not really worth the purchase unless you're taking the Digi course. If you are, then it's required so you might as well get it here.

Well written and easy to understand (unlike many books on home recording). It's broken down into step by step tutorials which, if followed, will teach you all the basics as you progress through the book. Highly recommended.

Having been given an Apple iMac complete with the GarageBand application, I was intrigued but at the same time a little apprehensive about trying it out. However, GarageBand 3 by Mary Plummer made it all so easy.
I decided to first do all the lessons; the instructions are clear and easy to follow, so it was a pleasure. I did sometimes take longer than the estimated time to do each lesson.
On completion, I had gained a comprehensive knowledge of all that this wonderfully creative program can accomplish, and was even enlightened as to what a podcast is. And if I forget again, the book is always at hand to remind me. I would have liked some comments about the advantages, if any, of other programs such as Logic.
My main interest with GarageBand lies in composing music, and this book introduced me to its many fascinating possibilities. So thank you, Mary Plummer. I must finish this now, to get back to Garageband....

I bought it so I could learn Garage Band 08 and thought initially that a lot of the information would be pertinent to the newest version of Garage Band 08. There are probably a lot of similarities and many aspects of the program that this book could help with, but when all is said and done, it is not the newest version that it teaches and knowing how eager I have been, in trying to learn about this program, I "jumped the gun", sort of speak. That is the thing about newer today, older tomorrow, you have to be careful only to buy the updated version and not the old one. I did not mean any disrespect by giving it 3 Stars for in reality I will never know how good of a book it is. I only wrote the review to point out that the new Garage Band 08 requires the updated book to go along with it. Happy Holidays and God Bless America!

I did not know what GarageBand was until I explored the icons on my new MAC. Needed help here. Logged on to Amazon.com and found Mary Plummer's book GARAGEBAND 3. I am learning the program by doing the lessons in the book, supplemented with CD lesson files. I am truly excited because it has opened a new world--creating music tracks. Each lesson is a building block, and Ms Plummer's instructions are easy to understand and follow.

An excellent training program for Macintosh's Garageband home recording studio for beginners. Easy to follow and use, but quite comprehensive at the same time. I wouldn't expect less from Apple.

Shulman is brilliant and convincing.... There is a free for all going on right now and a lot of public domain intellectual property is being squandered by opportunistic greedy business concerns and their parasite attorneys. The public is asleep at the wheel. When will they wake up? They are so asleep and sheep-like that it is easy to see how one could fall in to exploiting the situation. Still doesn’t make it right though. I dream that some day we as supposedly educated people will develop some higher ethical standards then we have now but some of these peoples actions detailed in this book make me wonder.

Shulman's book is worthless. This guy is a sensationlist hypocrite out to make a buck - if you don't believe me reconcile this quote: "Any schemes that foster the commercialization of intellectual property at the expense of free sharing of information and ideas will ultimately fail..." with the fact that I had to fork out $25 for Mr. Shulman's book and the copyright notice was prominently displayed on the first page!

Among many other failures Shulman totally ignores the underlying quid pro quo of the patent system - a limited monoploy in turn for complete disclosure of inventions.

The topic has been studied to death and it is always the case that extending patent protection into a new technological area results in increasesd innovation and more public discourse on ideas.

I would have given it 0 stars if allowed.

I am an IP attorney by trade but I can appreciate thoughful critiques of the current IP system. This was not one. Read Lawrence Lessig's or James Boyle's books (Code... and Shamans, Software and Spleens) if you want some light rather than heat accompanying a critique of current IP systems.

This one was a waste of trees!

This book totally changed my thinking about the new economy. It crackles with wide-ranging examples and clear-headed thinking. Everyone at the lab I work at has been talking about it and I think it will come to be considered a classic: Shulman zeroes in on the fundamental problems of creating a knowledge-based economy without strong, shared, civic protections on the knowledge we as a democracy need and want to share. Right now--right this minute--we need to begin to think about preserving our shared civic institutions--our libraries, museums, schools, universities, nonprofit hospitals and research centers. Shulman is brilliant and convincing in showing how their public-spirited missions have eroded and will surely erode further in the barrage of private intellectual property claims without our strenous intervention. Read this book. You will never think about intellectual property the same way again.

What makes this book pleasurable to read is that Shulman is an excellent writer. He makes great arguments and backs them up with solid case studies and examples. What's more is that he accurate in his observations.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in intellectual property and patents. The current bizarre world of patents and intellectual property is on the verge of blowing up just like the dot com fiasco. Shulman explains why the patent system as it now exists cannot continue indefinitely. The patenting of body processes, ideas, and business practices is absurd to even the casual reader. Shulman's examples will amaze you.

Who will not like this book are those people bent on patenting everything from colors to the properties of indigenous peoples. They will see this book as exposing the fact that the emperor is naked and if they are in the business, they won't like what they read. There is no question that a new invention, like a new computer chip, should be patented, but Shulman explains how far the patenting system has strayed away from the way it should work. This book will not tell you how to file a patent. It will not even give you a very good overview of the patent process. It is not for inventers. What it will do is make you shake you head in disbelief at the sorry state of the patent system and develop an instant dislike of some of the industries abusing the system.

What amazed me after reading Shulman's book is that there is no Ralph Nader kind of activist speaking out about the patent industry. The atrocities and deaths resulting from corporate misuse of the patent system fare exceed the scope and depth of Nader's attack of the auto industry. There exists a leadership vacuum in patent activism. Perhaps Shulman's book will awaken the leader we need to protect us from corporate misuse of patents and the broken patent system.

Notice that the only poor review of this book comes from an IP lawyer. Considering Shulman's analysis, which often remarks that the biggest winners of current IP laws are the lawyers who pursue infringement cases, it is no surprise. I was impressed with _Owning the Future_ because it successfully covered a wide terrain of significant topics in IP with a brisk, economical journalistic style, so I can share this book with any number of people. While I disagree with the somewhat moderate approach Schulman takes toward intellectual property rights and patent law--I am much more in line with Richard Stallman's reasoning--I found this book very informative. For the low price it is being offered for on Amazon, it's definitely worth it.

The book is probably the best reference on the field. The authors take their utmost effort to explain even some of the most subtle details but in a unified theoretical fashion. Must buy for anyone interested in the Speech processing Area

It is a classic and a necessary book for researchers in the speech processing area. Undergraduate students might find some sections of the book too theoretical. In which case, it is highly recommended as a reference book. It ranks among the best signal processing books ever written.

This book is very thorough, but at times it seems like the authors go out of their way to keep their discussion on a very theoretical level.

Chapter 1: A highly theoretical review of DSP. You need good knowledge of DSP to understand it.

Chapter 2: Goes over the human speech production and recognition systems. Here you get some practical info on the spectral and time-domain properties that distinguish speech sounds.

Chapter 3: Describes a model of the speech production based on a series of pulses passed through filters that correspond to features of the human speech production system. Practical issues such as which zero and pole values work best are left as an exercise to the reader.

Chapter 4: A lot of mathematics relating long-term statistical properties to those of a short frame of speech data. Contains good info on how to find recursive formulas for statistical properties of speech frames. It is a great shame that the authors don't include examples in MATLAB or pseudo code.

Chapter 5: Linear Prediction. Discusses a mathematical algorithm for creating a prediction filter that could be used to predict the next value in a series of data. In speech processing we are interested in using the coefficients of this prediction filter to encapsulate the properties of a speech frame. Examples of 1st,, 2nd, and 3rd order filters would have gone along way to illustrate how to implement this. There are some good formulas to measure the degree of similarities between speech frames based on their LP filter coefficients.

Chapter 6: Introduces the concept of the cepstrum. Cepstral analysis allows you to de-convolve speech data to separate the excitation source from the vocal tract filter. That way you can lifter out (a play on filter out) the excitation (responsible for pitch) and focus only on the vowel sounds. As always, how to make it work is left as an exercise.

The rest of the book is about speech coding and speech recognition. My class did not cover the later chapters, so I only read the parts that applied to projects.

The book helped me understand speech processing journal articles which tend to assume a lot of background knowledge.

The theoretical background that this book provides is necessary; good engineers need to understand the underpinnings of their bag of tricks. It is painful, however, at times. To apply the information in this book, you will certainly need a good mentor and a lot of tinkering in MATLAB.

This book covers many aspects of speech signal processing. In doing so, it is a great conceptual primer, but people with specific interests in one aspect or other of speech signal processing may look into other books. I have found it very valuable in clarifying certain concepts and an essential reference for my thesis. Some readers may find this book frustrating in some aspects because they are not familiar with the background of certain topics. It is often best to reread the conceptual portion of those chapters and look for other resources that explain the details of those topics in a more tangible language.

I was skeptical when I started on this book. But this book changed the way I looked a speech processing for ever. Wonderful classic on Speech Processing. I spent many moments with this book and came out with awe and respect for the authors. It is broad in its scope. Thanks IEEE for reissuing this classic.

A good book should make you think loud. This one does that job splendidly well.

I appreciated the balance between theory and implementation in the book. Also the content covers the most important topics. It is unfortunate that the book contains numerous typo's and confusing choices of symbols. The errors are often right in the most critical places too. The explanation of the theory of HMM's for example. 0 and 1 are chosen to represent both white and black balls and 2 different urns all in the same diagram. When trying to sort out which is which the reader will be further confused by blatant errors where a 0 should be a 1. I am afraid many new readers will find frustration on the theory sections.

The choice of C++ and inclusion of a CD-ROM with full source is a nice touch however. Just be aware that the code is not geared for real-time recognition.

This book is very useful for persons willing to implement a speech recognition system based on hidden Markov models (HMM). The authors provide the source code of a complete system. Each chapter is divided in two parts: theory and implementation. Some implementation issues are of interest only for those who develop code in C. I think this implementation-oriented book is a good complement for a theory-oriented book, as "Fundamentals of Speech Recog." by Rabiner and Juang. I really couldn't understand an appendix about "Econometric", that mainly discusses HREH (?) and just mentions HMM in the very end. The references related to this appendix were mixed with the ones related to speech, with an annoying result.

I want to know about HMM. And c-source code

This book is composed of two parts, theory and implementation. if you only read its theoretical part, it is ok with many details missing. it is not clearly written. however, if you study its C++ code, you would get all you want on recognition system. I spent 3-8 hours everyday for 4 months going through its code line by line. The C++ code (30,000 lines in total) is very well written but without comments. Many times, I need to figure out things not written in the book. I once spent 1 week on 200 lines of code. However, After 4 months, I truely understand the system.

You will find this book useful only if you really spend time covering its C++ code line by line. If you want theory only, goto read other books.

I rate 2 star for its theory and 5 star for its implementation.

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For studying the speech recognition subject this is not the right book to buy, It is hard to understand the theory using this book.
The c++ code works but there should be more remarks to make it easier to the readers to get along.
There is a free toolkit to download from the Internet named HTK
that contains full C code and a free book to the same theory so actually it is a waste of money to buy this book !!!

Of late, one cannot read the Wall Street Journal or watch CNBC without hearing some reference to Voice over Internet Protocol. It is the latest buzz in the business world, with companies such as AT&T and Comcast beginning to pilot Voice over IP (VoIP) products and services to its customers. The detailed technical aspects of VoIP are the basis of the Cisco Press book, "Deploying Cisco Voice over IP Solutions".

As announced in the first line of the Introduction, "Deploying Cisco Voice over IP Solutions" is the sequel of sorts to the Cisco Press book, "Voice over IP Fundaments". Rather than jumping right to a discussion of contents and merits of this book, first a word about what the book isn't. This book is not for the businessperson interested in learning more about the excitement and buzz around VoIP. Nor is it intended to be an introduction to VoIP or meant to address basic Cisco VoIP configurations for small and medium businesses (although there are many great configuration examples). Finally, this book is not meant to help you pass any specific certification exam, (although it likely should be on the list of any aspiring CCIE-Voice, such as myself). "Deploying Cisco Voice over IP Solutions" is targeted to engineers in large enterprises and/or service providers who are already comfortable with both the theoretical knowledge and practical experience of Cisco VoIP.

The book opens with a detailed explanation of voice traffic analysis, and specifically the Erlanger Traffic Models. Have your calculator handy and brush up on the algebra! It was nice to finally see a detailed discussion on the "mysterious" Erlanger Models that I've read some much about. This detailed discussion is indicative of the great detail the authors and editors delve into when they discuss other weighty topics such as Echo, CAC, QoS, Fax Services, and Prepaid Phone Services.

My only (nominal) complaint about "Deploying Cisco Voice over IP Solutions" was that it only briefly discusses CallManager. However, I'll let Cisco Press off the hook because they've published other more detailed books on the topic (and hey, CCM is really "just" an application on the VoIP network). There is also a chapter about the theory behind Unified Messaging. Although informative, it references Cisco's older product, uOne, which has been replaced by the more robust Cisco Unity. Perhaps the kind folks at Cisco Press will produce a book relating to that topic in 2004?

This is not a book that is aimed at helping the reader to pass exams. There are no questions, cram sheets or exam hints. Having said that, it does give a very good explanation of Echo, QoS and CAC. The only part that lets it down is that it's explanation of Unified Messaging is based on the older uOne product and not Unity. I found the IOS configuration examples to be very informative and useful in a real world scenario.

Overall, a useful reference book - but not one for passing exams.

Deploying Voice over IP Solutions is an effective reference for experienced Data and Voice Engineers when they are in the stage of designing, improving or identifying existing problems in the Packet voice infrastructure.

I should stress out that this book is not for beginners who are just getting into Packet Voice technologies as well as engineers who have a simple goal of just passing a certain voice exam. It is more targeted to an audience who has an extensive experience in both the voice and data field. Service provider engineers will have the most benefit utilizing this book. For beginners, I strongly recommend resorting to the VoIP fundamentals written by the same author.

The book starts by introducing traffic models for voice analysis. I find this chapter highly detailed and will probably be difficult (and dry) for most of the engineers out there. Chapter 1 should be more condensed and have less detail for the target audience of this book. However, Chapter 2 to 4 which deals with quality of service and Call admission controls are one of the most useful and relevant in the design and implementation aspects of Voice over IP. These three chapters are well worth the cover book price. As far as the examples, I would strongly suggest the whole capture of the configurations (i.e. sh run) and provide more detail and larger illustrations. The remaining chapters dealt with designing VoIP for Service providers and Managed Multiservice networks which can also be useful to Enterprises who are considering to utilize this emerging service as opposed to an in-house VoIP solution. As a note to the author, maybe it's time to revamp the Cisco Uone unified messaging to the new Cisco Unity. I would also suggest including an e-book copy from a CD.

In conclusion, I find this book very informative for engineers who really want to get an in-depth understanding of the design and troubleshooting of Packet voice networks most specifically when dealing with traffic engineering. I rate this book 5 out of 5 and highly recommended it.

The first few chapters covers various voice analysis - which I found useful: (Traffic, echo, QoS, CAC). The strengths of this book are in the tips, advice and some great scenarios. The weakness is the lack of details, - no running configs, and too few sample configurations.etc. The book tries to cover a broad spectrum of voip - prepaid, pbx, fax, unified messaging. This is where is fails. Each one of these topics should have their own book. I feel as if this book fails to explain in better detail how a dial-peer works, what options (hidden or otherwise) exist and how to overcome common problems. The gatekeeper coverage is lacking (mostly theory which is discussed as if the reader is experienced with Gatekeepers) and I would not recommend this book for a practical setup. It is very apparent that it was written by several authors, the topics are disconnected. It was helpful to some degree - in conjunction with Troubleshooting Cisco IP Telephony (Cisco Press) and the *very* useful Cisco technical support knowledge base. I would like to see a more comprehensive book that covers all possible configurations for a Cisco router/access gateway(runing-config) and in what cases it would be beneficial, with scenarios. I gave it 3 stars - because I feel that a great void exists in good technical manuals for VOIP, and this book is a step in the right direction.

This book is different from other books in image processing, since it also handles speech processing and gives much information on programming in C++. The authors provide free source codes with this book on a ftp-site.

The first introduction is about software development and ways to work with more people on one source code. It gives much information on programming. Then information is given on the difference between C and C++. I liked this overview very much, since I am used to program in C and not in C++.

An overview is given of the different kind of image processing operations in a compact way. Some information is given on statistical and neural pattern recogniton.

This book is a good learning book, whereas it can also be used as a reference source. The contents of the book is organized in a proper way, so it is not difficult to find the right information.

The book covers most topics which is very seldom found any where else

The book took very nice and broad scope of Signal Processing.
Unfortunately not all subjects are disclosed self-consistent.
The best benefit I get from chapters where the subject was already familiar from other sources.
I could not recomend this book for initial aquintment with Signal Processing, although with some previous knowledge the book could be interesting.

I had the pleasure of being a student of the author's at MIT when the course notes that later became this text were under development. Having learnt about speech processing from the author and these notes, I can knowlingly comment on the clarity and depth of the material in the text and can recommend it with confidence. The book takes the reader from a fundamental review of concepts in signal processing and probability/stochastic processes through the broad range of areas in speech processing. That the author is a leading researcher in this area is reflected in the coverage of recent research advances and a bibliography that can point the conscientious reader towards current publications if desired. I strongly recommend this text to anyone interested in learning about signal processing in the context of speech.

Rather than argue a thesis, Toop's style is the chase down a thread of meaning via the points at which various thoughts and anecdotes cross over. This perfectly suits the nature of his subject matter- the vast, largely uncharted terrain of non-genre-based music, for which a dominant narrative and vocabulary do not yet exist as with, say, rock 'n roll or classical.

The book meditates on, among other things, the boundary between performer and audience, environmental sound and music, improviser and composer, and the role of digital technology in mediating or enhancing these distinctions.

As a journeyman music writer, critic and musician, Toop has spent a lot of his time travelling. This seems to inform his writing style as he is constantly in motion, moving quickly between personal recollections, excerpts from correspondence with diverse musicians, and lengthy quotes from various topically obscure yet philosophically related texts.

These (non-)random stop-overs make the book a slow read, as the reader is left to do a lot of the piecing together. Yet this is part of the pleasure to be found in Toop's writing- like a brilliant but challenging piece of music, the book offers an experience in which the mind of the reader is engaged as more than just a passive receptor of received ideas and emotion.

Beautiful, challenging and nourishing.

I read this upon its UK release in July and still find myself dwelling upon some of the ideas raised. Reading it challenged me to use my ears afresh, and to think about what music can be.