A speech visualization system is proposed thatcould be used by a deaf person for understanding speech.Several novel techniques are proposed, including: (1) Minimizing spectral leakage in the Fourier transform by using avariable-length window. (2) Making use of the fact that there is no spectral leakage in order to calculate how much of the energy of the speech signal is due to its periodic component vs. its nonperiodic component. (3) Modelling the mouth and lips as a band-pass filter and estimating the central frequency and bandwidth of this filter in order to assign colours tounvoiced speech sounds.