My firm, Perceptral LLC, is currently advertising three open research positions in speech technology, to support current and pending contracts for Research & Development. To read the full job announcements, please visit http://www.perceptral.com, and click on “Careers”.
Thanks to the diligence of Joseph Bauer (intern at Perceptral LLC), this website is now back up and running with all previous content restored! More to come.
Speech Prosody 2008, in Campinas, Brazil has announced the call for papers.
Elliott D. Ross and colleagues have long studied the impact of particular right hemisphere neuropathologies on affective speech prosody, syndromes collectively termed the aprosodias. (See the Song, Speech, and Brain bibliography for some details). If we develop the tools for automatic extraction of voice features (ones that would be necessary to produce animated synthetic voices), it would be possible to see a future where audio recordings of patients speaking would become a normal part of a medical file. These audio recordings could be subject to automatic analysis and extraction of individual voice features. A comparison from such baseline recordings with post-event recordings could provide cues to identifying neuropathologies that might be otherwise missed. They could also serve as a method for the analysis and quantification of dysarthria and other voice affecting disorders.
These features as well must certainly play a role in voice identification and verification systems. The problem at hand is finding a way to automatically (and reliably) extract these features of voice (timing, pitch, phonemes/allophonic variation, timbre) and to classify them for analysis and comparison.
Such systems could go beyond medical applications as well. There is no reason why automatic extraction of features couldn’t be applied for military and intelligence applications, to quickly identify dialects and languages, or be able to recognize an impostor, someone speaking a non-native dialect or language. These systems could also be used for pedagogical purposes to assist learners in acquiring a near-native accent in a foreign language, by providing a better understanding of the features common to native speakers, and analysis and feedback on the learner’s production. This would be a giant stride forward from the overly simplistic acoustic language learning tools (that provide too literal a comparison from model to learner), which are currently available.
Is anyone working on developing these tools? I’ve heard nothing. Anyone interested?
The slide show and handout for Jonathan’s presentation at the 2007 annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS) in Siegen has been added to the website.
A link has been added (on my CV page) to the target article “In Time with the Music,” by Clayton, Sager, & Will, which includes an invited commentary by me entitled, “Cognitive vs. Physical Entrainment”. The article appeared in the first edition of ESEM CounterPoint, which seems to have since folded. The link above appears on the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts. Please note also, their upcoming workshop, May 11-13 on Music, Rhythm, and the Brain.
Sorry to those of you who may have encountered difficulties over the past few days accessing musiclanguage.net. The site was down for about two days. All systems have been restored, and no data seems to have been lost, other than potentially a few emails. Sorry for any inconvenience.
SpeechTek & SpeechTek West 2007 have been added to the conferences page.
A link has been added on the Societies page to the website of HUMAINE, otherwise known as emotion-research.net.
InterSpeech 2007 has announced their call for papers. You can find it on the Conferences page.
New updates to “Other Researchers” and “Where to Study” pages. Please forward any suggestions or questions to Jonathan.
The community here at Music & Language Studies is growing. As you see below, the first “guest” posting has appeared with Bruce Richman’s discussion of his approach to using songs in teaching English speech intonation and rhythm.
I would like to invite others who are interested to email me regarding the possibility of contributing to this website. All subscribers are able to post comments. If you would like to upload files, add links, or write posts, please let me know.
Best to all,
Jonathan Pearl
jonathan @ musiclanguage.net
