Laboratory on the Physiology, Acoustics, and Perception of Speech
An MIT OpenCourseWare lab course on experimental methods for studying speech. Students measure articulatory movements, record pressures and airflows during speech production, and run computer-aided waveform and spectral analysis on recorded sounds. The syllabus covers speech synthesis, perception and discrimination of speechlike sounds, prosody, models used in speech recognition, and speech disorders. The format runs two one-hour lectures and two lab sessions per week, with brief lab reports throughout and a term project supported by a short paper instead of exams. Materials come from MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Health Sciences and Technology departments, reflecting the course's mix of engineering measurement techniques and linguistic analysis. Free to audit through MIT OpenCourseWare, with lecture notes and assignment materials available online.