CS 224S/LINGUIST 136/236 Spring 2004 Jurafsky

Notes on Sonic

Some of you are interested in using Sonic for your projects. Sonic is available to us in binaries (currently not source) for many platforms, including Linux and Windows. It comes with various tools and etc. It's free, but any of you that want to use Sonic will have to individually register before they will mail you the license. To register, go here: http://cslr.colorado.edu/beginweb/speech_recognition/sonic_main.html

I recommend that you begin with Sonic by working your way through the Digits tutorial. The digits tutorial is here: /afs/ir/class/linguist236/digit-tutorial/sonic-digit-tutorial-2.0-beta2.pdf

I have installed the various relevant software in the class directory. In order to work through the digit tutorial, you'll want to make the following changes:

add these to your path in your .cshrc file (for the non-unix people, ask if you can't figure this out)

/afs/ir.stanford.edu/class/linguist236/sonic/2.0-beta2/bin/i686-Linux
/afs/ir.stanford.edu/class/linguist236/sonic/2.0-beta2/contrib/bin/i686-Linux
/afs/ir/class/linguist236/CMU-Cam_Toolkit_v2/bin
/afs/ir.stanford.edu/class/linguist236/sctk-1.2c/bin
/afs/ir.stanford.edu/class/linguist236/snack2.2.4/demos/tcl

Set this environment variable, also in your .cshrc

    setenv TCLLIBPATH /afs/ir/class/linguist236/snack2.2.4/unix

Now copy the data from:
```
/afs/ir/class/linguist236/digit-tutorial
```
into your own directory. You can't run the tutorial here, since otherwise you will overwrite each others' data files. It will be most efficient if you put the data on a local disk on whatever machine you are going to run Sonic (i.e. a local scratch disk on your machine, or your home directory if it is physically on your machine). Locally is best because otherwise you will be sending lots of speech data over the internet, which will make training painfully slow.
Now work through the digit tutorial itself. One hint/change to the manual:
1. page 10: if oss_play doesn't work on your machine, try this: play -r 8000 -s w -f s acw_13a.raw