Final-year Project and Limited Resources
From the last semester, I work on my final-year project. This project is about articulatory model speech synthesizer as a part of text-to-speech (TTS) system. Specifically, I work on parameterization of the model in order to generate Indonesian phoneme. To do that I have to know about how speech sounds are produced and then how we classify and transcribe speech sounds. In addition, I also have to know about the acoustic properties of speech sounds. In other words, I have to study about phonetics.
Phonetics is a new thing for me. I have to study all of that stuff by myself, no one teach me, and no one help me to understand the stuff. At first, I think I can cope with that problem because I have used to study things by myself. Unfortunately, I hardly (maybe I can use the term “can’t” here) find good and suitable literature about phonetics for me. If you tell me, “Search with Google and you’ll find a bunch of them, man..!” I will tell you, “All of that stuff talks about English, not Indonesian…”
You have to aware that phonetics is all about language and one language differ from the others. Actually I can use literature about English phonetics, but then I have to distinguish what phonemes are used in Indonesian and what phonemes are not. Because I’m neither a linguist nor a specialist in this field, I afraid I can’t pick the right phoneme and, in the future days, it will affect my project.
