SPTK basic operation: .wav, .raw., .short

The Speech Signal Processing Toolkit (SPTK) is a suite of speech signal processing tools for UNIX environments, e.g., LPC analysis, PARCOR analysis, LSP analysis, PARCOR synthesis filter, LSP synthesis filter, vector quantization techniques, and other extended versions of them. It is developed by Prof. Imai and Prof. Kobayashi of Tokyo Inst. of Tech, and currently maintained by Nagoya Inst. of Tech. To install SPTK in Linux and Unix based-OS is easy, download the source file, extract and do the following,

./configure
make
sudo make install

That's all installation process, it will install SPTK in /usr/local/SPTK by default.

Add SPTK path to .bashrc

Now SPTK is installed in our machine, but by default it is (SPTK command) not searchable in our shell/terminal. To make it searchable (instead of use /usr/local/SPTK/bin/command everytime), we can add the path to .bashrc. Open .bashrc with editor (vim/gedit/other) and add the following,

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/SPTK/bin

And it's added to our command path, check it by using "impulse -h" in terminal. If done, it will show man pages of "impulse" command.

Remove Header : Convert Wav to Raw

SPTK provide utilities to remove header file in sound recording process by converting wav files to raw files (and we can convert it back to wav file). Here is how,

wav2raw +s data.wav

In current directory, there will be new file data.raw with header file removed. Argumen +s is for short data type, you can check full argument by wav2raw -h. To convert back in wav, use "raw2wav" command.

Convert to Short

To convert data from raw, wav or other format to .short (because mainly processing in SPTK is in .short format) we use command "x2x",

x2x +s data.raw > data.short 

It will covert raw to short, you can try to change other format.

Plot Waveform

Plot waveform in SPTK

One of two method that I usually used to check result in sound wave manipulation is by plot its waveform (another is by listening its sound). To plot waveform in SPTK, we use gwave command,

gwave -i 1 +s data.short | xgr

Then, new window will appear showing waveform plot of data.short. Argumen "-i 1" is to make waveform in one window (by default, it is 5) and +s is for short. We can add more command to save waveform image (in .eps file or other).

gwave -i 1 +s data.short | xgr > data.eps

We can change eps to other format like png, jpg and bmp. But, using eps gives advantages because it is editable (in inkscape or other). If you find error while plotting, copy your error message, and paste it to Google... :)

Play Sound/Music

Another way to check sound wave manipulation is by listening its sound. In SPTK we use "da" command to listened processed sound. For example we want to listen data.short file, we use the following command,

da -s 8 data.short

Now listen your machine, it will emitted sound "data.short".

Automatic All, Bulk conversion!

Now is time for bash.  Let bash convert .wav to .raw and from .raw to .short in magic, not depend on how many file is, it will convert from .wav to .short as fast as possible. Check my Github page below to find the codes.

https://github.com/bagustris/VibrasticLab