The design of a speech analysis workstation

Abstract

The recent availability of general purpose digital signal processing chips, inexpensive digital memories, and personal computers has opened the door to the development of a powerful workstation designed for the analysis of speech. A system can be developed with the advantages of a spectrograph (e.g., Sona‐Graph), an oscillograph (e.g., Visicorder), a feature extractor (e.g., Visi‐Pitch), and a general purpose computer (e.g., VAX with DSP software). This paper describes the development and capabilities of a standalone system based on a common microprocessor, powerful digital signal processing circuits, high‐resolution graphic displays and high‐speed DMA capabilities. The digital signal processing chip selected was the 32020 from Texas Instruments. Special high‐speed DMA chips were used to facilitate high‐speed data transfer between the different system modules (A/D to memory, memory to DSP circuits, DSP circuits to graphic circuits, and DSP circuits to printer). These DMA chips allow a 2‐Mbyte/s transfer rate. The system management is performed by a Motorola 68000 and the system architecture has been defined to include up to 8 Mbytes of RAM. This system performs all the desired functions of a speech workstation and could provide a common platform for speech analysis research.