Acoustic Investigation of Sindhi Consonants using Waveform and Spectrogram Techniques

Abstract

Sindhi language has many accents and also contains a large variety of vowels, consonants and phonemes which can be extended at any place. The description and analysis of prosodic features are compulsory for various Speech Processing (SP) Applications. The accuracy of SP applications is not accurate due to the indistinct uniformity in consonants, which make similar sounds. In this paper, two of the prospective parameters of prosody; duration and pitch are used for extraction of features from the recorded sounds of both male and female speakers. To study these phonemes, twelve most frequently used consonant-phons are selected and distributed into six groups of experiments. The recorded sounds are subjected to a methodology that is also described and then applied in this work. The PRAAT speech analyzer tool is used to obtain the results of sound duration and pitch parameters. This study revealed that the sound duration and pitch of the female speakers are higher than the male speakers. The discussed pitch values proved that some of the identified consonants produce similar sounds and that others are quite different. The outcomes of this study will be of great benefit in the advancement of Sindhi SP applications