Recalling sage Panini's 2,000-year-old contribution to acoustics, the former Vice-Chancellor of Hyderabad University, B.S. Ramakrishna, on Thursday said the sage's well-researched arrangement of the alphabet of Devanagiri script was a unique effort.
Inaugurating a national workshop on "Acoustic analysis of speech'' here, Prof. Ramakrishna said the scientific arrangement of alphabets of Devanagiri script was in accordance with the pronunciation of sounds. "This is not found in any other language in the world,'' Prof. Ramakrishna said.
Objective
Organised by the Department of Speech Language Sciences, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing (AIISH) and the Central Institute of Indian Languages, the workshop is aimed at training speech pathologists and linguists on the more recent techniques of acoustic analysis of speech.
The participants will be trained in the methods of acoustic analysis, which will be relevant to the acoustic theory of speech production.
Pioneer
Prof. Ramakrishna described Panini as the first researcher in the field of acoustics. Dwelling upon the connection between the eye and the ear, Prof. Ramakrishna gave examples to prove the "McGurk effect". He called upon young researchers to work on the "McGurk effect" and the "Cocktail party effect".
In his presidential address, the Director of All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysore, M. Jayaram, said the primary responsibility of speech pathologists was to use information from acoustic analysis to correct speech impairment.
The results of acoustic analysis of speech had been used to develop automatic speech recognition systems and speech transmission system.
The analysis also had its use in
the synthesis of speech and music. About 100 delegates from all parts of
South India, Shillong, Assam, Chandigarh and Mumbai are participating in
the workshop.