Example of Syllable AM peak detection and evaluation.

The example shows the trochaic nursery rhyme sentence "Jack and Jill". (Top). The Syllable AMs from spectral bands 1–5 are each plotted in separate rows in different colours. The original pool of candidate peaks that were detected in these 5 AMs are shown as coloured dots. The vertical dotted lines indicate the actual (manually-annotated) location of syllable vowel nuclei in the sentence.(Bottom) Results of the peak evaluation procedure. The Syllable AMs from 3 power-ranked primary (Band #2), secondary (Band #1) and tertiary (Band #3) spectral bands are overlaid on the original acoustic waveform. The final selected Syllable AM peaks (= model-detected syllable vowel nuclei) are shown as black dots. The actual syllable vowel nuclei in the utterance are shown as black crosses. Notice that the Syllable AM peaks in the primary spectral band (#2, yellow) correctly correspond to almost all the actual syllable vowel nuclei, with the exception of the syllable "to", whose vowel nucleus is captured within the secondary spectral band (#1, red).