Ling 716: Phonetics Seminar / FALL 2019
Dimensions of voice quality

Overview

This is a graduate-level phonetics seminar. There are two goals for this course. The first is empirical: to expose students to the phonetics of the voice source, e.g., phonation contrasts of the world's languages; articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual models of voice quality, and how to study them. The second is methodological. The challenge of understanding the phonetic spaces of voice quality forces us to confront two methodological issues that are common in phonetic research: massive collinearity in high-dimensional spaces and time series analysis. In this course, students will be introduced to current methods to tackle these two challenges and they will be implement them on voice quality acoustic data sets. In addition, we will work together to design a perceptual experiment starting around Weeks 5-6 that we will start running in the second half of the semester. The work emerging from acoustic analysis and the perceptual experiment is expected to result in eventual journal publications that students will be encouraged to participate in as collaborators.

Calendar (tentative)

Current Week

Week Date Topic Class HW to do
13 Tu 12/03 Final project: VoiceSauce processing/FDA Reports on exploratory data analysis, discussion of next steps Do second VoiceSauce processing assignment (due by 11:59PM Friday 12/06)
Th 12/05 FDA, clustering, GAMMs and write-up discussion Analysis/write-up planning
Tu 12/10 Final project: write-up
Th 12/20 Speech Prosody submission due

Upcoming Weeks

Week Date Topic Class HW to do

Past Weeks

Week Date Topic Class HW to do
12 Tu 11/19 Final project: exploratory analysis Exploratory analysis Do exploratory analysis in R notebook, due by 11/22
Th 11/21 KY away for RecPhon
11 Tu 11/12 Final project: parameter extraction (Speech Prosody 2020) Finish up GAMMs tutorial, intro to final project
Th 11/14 Parameter extraction Do first VoiceSauce processing assignment (due by class time Tues 11/19)
10 Tu 11/05 Intro to generalized additive mixed modeling Student presentation: Wieling 2018, Michael Clark GAMs introduction, Soskuthy tutorial
Th 11/07
09 Tu 10/29 Intro to Functional Data Analysis Student presentation: Gubian materials
Th 10/31
08 Tu 10/22 Intro to collinearity Tomaschek et al. (2018) Work through Tomaschek et al. paper through section 4 and code up through SupplementaryMaterial_P2_Inspect_collinearity.html
Th 10/24
07 Tu 10/15 NO CLASS (UMass Monday)
Th 10/17 VS benchmarks, FDA discussion Be ready to present FDA next week, start looking at GAMMs too
06 Tu 10/08 VS benchmarks, FDA, teaching class notes Prep FDA tutorial
Th 10/10 KY away for NWAV
05 Tu 10/01 Semi-automated acoustic methods: introduction to VoiceSauce class notes Determine which stats method you will present by start of class 10/03
Th 10/03 ...continued Go through FDA tutorial, check VoiceSauce with hand-measured benchmarks
04 Tu 09/24 Student presentations Measures of the glottal source spectrum. Kreiman, Gerratt and Antonanzas-Barroso 2007: Seoyoung, Modeling the voice source in terms of spectral slopes. Garellek, Samlan, Gerratt and Kreiman (2015)., see also POMA proceedings and POMA poster: Alex
Th 09/26 Student presentations Perceptual sensitivity to first harmonic amplitude in the voice source. Kreiman and Gerratt (2010), see also follow-up article: Claudia Due by beginning of class Tues 10/01: See class notes for assignment. Install Matlab and download VoiceSauce
03 Tu 09/17 Psychoacoustic model overview / how to review a paper notes Choose one of the papers to review/present next week
Th 09/19 More psychoacoustic model discussion, articulatory modeling High speed video: Chen (2014), Glottaltopogram, Body-cover model: NCVS tutorial, Story (2002) Two-layer model: Zhang (2009), Zhang et al. (2013)
02 Tu 09/10 Spectrum review exercises (pdf)
Th 09/12 Discussion of Garellek (2019) plan Read Kreiman et al. 2014 and post at least 5 questions and/or comments in the Box discussion thread by Monday 09/16 12pm
01 Tu 09/03 Voice quality around the world notes Due by class 09/05: Read Kreiman and Sidtis Chapters 1-2.
Th 09/05 Discussion of K&S reading notes Due by class 09/10: Read Garellek (2019) and answer reading questions

Requirements

Readings and Exercises

Readings will be assigned approximately weekly, particularly in the first half of the course, linked from this page. Reading questions will be assigned for each reading and are due before class when the reading is due, accounting for a total of 15% of the grade.

Each student must also choose one of the readings to do a review on, i.e., a review that you would submit as part of the peer review process in journal article publication; the review will count for 15% of the grade.

Class presentation

Each student will study one of the methods we are covering in the course and be responsible for teaching it to the class, for 20% of grade.

Experimental design

Student participation in the design of the perceptual experiment---including acoustic data analysis that will help guide the design of the experiment---will be organized into a few different milestones (TBA) during the semester, the completion of which will account for a total of 50% of the grade.

Resources

Voice quality data and analysis

Statistical analysis

Miscellaneous