Casio Lyric Creator: Pronunciation - Sand, software and sound

You might decide to fine tune the Casio CT-S1000V’s pronunciation of certain words or syllables. Crack open Casio Lyric Creator, select a lyric phrase, and long-press a word or syllable. Lyric Creator opens the “Edit Phonemes” display.

If you’re working in English, Lyric Creator shows the word’s phonetic translation above a peculiar looking on-screen keyboard. The keys correspond to the major phonemes in the English language.

If you want to spend (waste) an entire afternoon, query English phonics. At the very least, you’ll finding articles about phonics for first readers. If you deep dive further, you will be down the infinite rabbit hole of linguistics. Beware!

Sometimes it’s worth it to check up on Lyric Creator. In one version of “Amazing Grace,” Lyric Creator produced the ‘G’ at the beginning of “Grace.” In another version, it didn’t produce the ‘G’ at all. YMMV. The C-MU Pocket Sphinx of 10,000 frequent words is a good resource when checking pronounciations. [Hope they didn’t ask anyone from Pittsburgh to make this list.]

There are roughly 44 common phonemes in English separated into vowels and consonants. Looking at the phoneme keyboard, most of the consonants make sense. There are a few two-letter combinations like “ng”, “tt”, “th”, “jh”, and “zh”. These cover sounds like the “ng” in “sing”.

The vowels, however, are not what they appear to be! The phonemes follow the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). [Not “India Pale Ale”.] The IPA has more special characters (glyphs) than Iverson’s APL (A Programming Language). The glyphs are mapped to two- and three-character sequences.

So, what reference phonetic alphabet does Lyric Creator use? CT-S1000V Vocal Synthesis was trained on the Carnegie-Mellon University (C-MU) Pronouncing Dictionary. The C-MU Pronouncing Dictionary employs the ARPAbet, which was first used in speech recognition research.

Here’s a quick and dirty correspondence table between symbols in the ARPAbet and English sounds:

    Vowels          Consonants      Consonants 
    ----------      ----------      ---------- 
    aa   bOt        b    Buy        ng   siNG 
    ae   bAt        ch   CHin       p    Pie 
    ah   bUt        d    Die        r    Rye 
    ax   oracLE     dd   miDDle     s    Sigh 
    ao   OUght      dh   THy        sh   SHy 
    aw   bOUt       f    Fight      t    Tie 
    axr  lettER     g    Guy        tt   auTumn 
    ay   bIte       hh   High       th   THigh 
    eh   bEt        jh   Jive       v    Vie 
    er   bIRd       k    Kite       w    Wise 
    ey   bAIt       l    Lie        y    Yacht 
    ih   bIt        m    My         z    Zoo 
    iy   bEAt       mm              zh   diviSion 
    ow   bOAt       n    Night      cl 
    oy   bOY        nn   wiNNer     
    uh   bOOk 
    uw   bOOt

You’ll notice several oddities among the English vowels, e.g., “ay” producing the long ‘i’ sound in “bite”. “ay”, really? No doubt, you saw the “ey” in “Grace” and thought that was strange, too.

The 44 common phonemes aside, there are a few phonemes in the Lyric Creator keyboard that required investigation. There are a few phonemes for which I have no clue! Next are a few special cases for your consideration.

There are two “th” sounds: voiced and unvoiced. A voiced sound is produced with the vocal chords; An unvoiced sound is produced solely by other components of the vocal tract. In Lyric Creator:

“dh” is the voiced “th” sound.
“th” is the unvoiced “th” sound.

Some vowel sounds are influenced by the letter ‘r’. The phoneme “axr” is a vowel influenced by ‘r’ as in “creator” or “letter”.

“ax” turns up in some interesting cases like “autumn” (ao,tt,ax,m), “middle” (m,ih,dd,ax,l) and “kindle” (k,ih,n,d,ax,l).

The word “middle” contains “dd” and “tt”. These phonemes lead to a discussion of alveolar flapping in English. [Yes, “flapping”.] We now stand at the maw of the rabbit hole and I will take my leave.

Have fun!