Book of Abstracts: July 2013 Paliwanagan sa UP Diliman July 2013 | Page 31

About the Designers
Grace Montemayor is an Architect and lighting designer. She graduated from the
College of Architecture, UP Diliman in 2011.
Lea Ramos is currently a design associate at the DA Silvestre and Associates.
She obtained her BS Architecture degree in 2011 from UP Diliman.
Patrick Agpalza earned his BS in Architecture from UP Diliman.

PHILIPPINE BAMBOO MUSICAL INSTRUMENT SYNTHESIZER
Jessa Faye M. Rili, Mac Romie V. Credo, Andrew Noel B. Aragon,
Elixa-Mae A. Pesa & Lorenzo C. Zulueta
Bamboo musical instruments, indigenous to ethno-linguistic groups of the
Philippines, are unknown to most Filipinos. While crafting these instruments from
bamboo may be the best way to learn about them and, consequently, our musical
heritage, the next best thing would be a realistic simulation of their sound. The
Philippine Bamboo Musical Instrument S ynthesizer is a software application that
enables users to recreate the sounds of five (5) bamboo instruments: the Kolitong
(polychordal bamboo tube zither), Diwas (bamboo panpipes), Takumbo (parallelstringed tube zither), Gabbang (bamboo xylophone), and Bungkaka (bamboo
buzzer).
To develop the synthesizer, sound recordings of the five bamboo instruments
were analyzed and correlated with the physical properties of the instruments.
Physical modeling techniques were incorporated in synthesis functions for each
instrument and integrated into a software application. The software includes a
graphical interface that allows the user to adjust an instrument’s physical
parameters and hear and save the sound that that instrument produces, along
with the physical parameters. Two-interval Forced Choice (2IFC) tests were
conducted to determine if the synthesized sounds were sufficiently
indistinguishable from the original sounds of the instruments; the tests yielded
satisfactory results.
About the Research Team
The research team members all received their BS degree from the Electrical and
Electronics Engineering Institute. Jessa Faye M. Rili, Mac Romie V. Credo and
Elixa-Mae A. Pesa majored in Computer Engineering, while Andrew Noel B. Aragon
and Lorenzo C. Zulueta majored in Electronics and Communications Engineering.

58 Paliwanagan sa UP Diliman

FILIPINO SPEECH RECOGNITION AND SYNTHESIS
Rowena Cristina L. Guevara & Rhandley D. Cajote
There is no doubt that the use of speech recognition and synthesis is becoming
popular in today’s human-machine interfaces. In the Philippines, the Digital Signal
Processing (DSP) Lab of UP Diliman currently supports a continuous effort to
develop robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS)
systems that can handle Filipino speech and can be applied commercially in the
near future. The DSP Lab is implementing several projects that focus on Philippine
languages and speech as these relate to education and differently-abled persons.
These projects include the following:
•

Digital database of Filipino words (Bantay Wika) – this database will aid in a)
monitoring the development and b) the intellectualization of the Filipino language.

•

Real-time closed captioning for Filipino news – this project will help address
barriers in information access among hearing-impaired Filipinos.

•

Real-time Filipino speech synthesizer – aside from being a useful tool for
language learning, the synthesizer can be used as a reading aid by the visuallyimpaired and as a communication aid of the vocally-handicapped.

•

Philippine languages database for mother tongue multi-lingual education – the
project aims to create a corpora that will jumpstart the preservation of Philippine
languages and development of speech-based applications.

•

Algorithms for Filipino sign language – implemented in collaboration with
Dr. Prospero C. Naval, Jr. of the Department of Computer Science, the project
involves the development of software that will be able to recognize sign
language from gestures.

•

Automatic Reading Tutor (ART) – this project aims to develop a software
application that will help children learn how to read Filipino by providing automatic
feedback to the reader.

About the Project Leaders
Dr. Rowena Cristina L. Guevara is a Professor at the Electrical and Electronics
Engineering Institute of the College of Engineering. She is currently on special
detail at the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) as the Executive
Director of the Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology
Research and Development (PCIEERD). Dr. Guevara specializes in speech and
audio signal processing, time-frequency analysis and synthesis, and artificial
intelligence. She has received various awards in engineering and education,

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