About
The Cornell Phonetics Lab is a group of students and faculty who are curious about speech. We study patterns in speech — in both movement and sound. We do a variety research — experiments, fieldwork, and corpus studies. We test theories and build models of the mechanisms that create patterns. Learn more about our Research. See below for information on our events and our facilities.
Upcoming Events
12th March 2021 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
We will discuss the paper "Phonetic realization of focus in English declarative intonation"
Location:
15th March 2021 10:30 AM
Words Matter: Labeling Disputes - talk by Dr. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Professor Emerita, Linguistics
Dr. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Professor Emerita of Linguistics, has recently published a book called "Words Matter: Meaning and Power", and in her talk Dr. McConnell-Ginet will discuss labels like American(n) and patriot(ic) in American society.
Dr. McConnell-Ginetwas also interviewed by the Cornell Chronicle about her new book and its relevance to our society.
Contact Linguistic Department administrator Gretchen Ryan for the Zoom link to this talk.
Abstract
"As I argue in my recent book, Words Matter: Meaning and Power, linguistic choices often have substantive effects, sometimes unintended. Slogans like “that’s just semantics” or “it’s only words” are profoundly misleading. It is easy to think, however, that linguistic politics is only about introducing new linguistic practices like using the label Latinx or specifying pronoun preferences.
But struggles also arise over criteria for applying familiar words. Rape and marriage are two examples I discuss in the book, and in those cases the words figure prominently not only in interpersonal and family matters but also in legislative and judicial concerns.
This talk will focus on labels like America(n) and patriot(ic) that have occurred frequently in recent pronouncements both from political leaders in public contexts and also in discourse of a wide range of ordinary people in a variety of settings.
Location:17th March 2021 11:20 AM
PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group
Dr. James Frances Antaki, Cornell Professor of Biomedical Engineering, will discuss research on visualizing vocal apparatus behavior while playing the harmonica. Dr. Antaki would also like to discuss possible collaborative research with the Phonetics Lab.
While Dr. Antaki's main research area is heart assist technology, he also has a company called TurboHarp that sells high-tech harps and harmonicas.
Location:19th March 2021 12:40 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting- with Prospective Students
On Friday March 19th, we will have a lab meeting attended by prospective grad students.
All advanced (2nd year and older) Phonetics Lab grad student lab members will give a brief (5 min), high-level overview of their current research, i.e. questions/hypotheses, methods, and example data if available.
Location:
Facilities
The Cornell Phonetics Laboratory (CPL) provides an integrated environment for the experimental study of speech and language, including its production, perception, and acquisition.
Located in Morrill Hall, the laboratory consists of six adjacent rooms and covers about 1,600 square feet. Its facilities include a variety of hardware and software for analyzing and editing speech, for running experiments, for synthesizing speech, and for developing and testing phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguistic models.
Web-Based Phonetics and Phonology Experiments with LabVanced
The Phonetics Lab licenses the LabVanced software for designing and conducting web-based experiments.
Labvanced has particular value for phonetics and phonology experiments because of its:
- *Flexible audio/video recording capabilities and online eye-tracking.
- *Presentation of any kind of stimuli, including audio and video
- *Highly accurate response time measurement
- *Researchers can interactively build experiments with LabVanced's graphical task builder, without having to write any code.
Students and Faculty are currently using LabVanced to design web experiments involving eye-tracking, audio recording, and perception studies.
Subjects are recruited via several online systems:
- * Prolific and Amazon Mechanical Turk - subjects for web-based experiments.
- * Sona Systems - Cornell subjects for for LabVanced experiments conducted in the Phonetics Lab's Sound Booth
Computing Resources
The Phonetics Lab maintains two Linux servers that are located in the Rhodes Hall server farm:
- Lingual - This Ubuntu Linux web server hosts the Phonetics Lab Drupal websites, along with a number of event and faculty/grad student HTML/CSS websites.
- Uvular - This Ubuntu Linux dual-processor, 24-core, two GPU server is the computational workhorse for the Phonetics lab, and is primarily used for deep-learning projects.
In addition to the Phonetics Lab servers, students can request access to additional computing resources of the Computational Linguistics lab:
- *Badjak - a Linux GPU-based compute server with eight NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti GPUs
- *Compute server #2 - a Linux GPU-based compute server with eight NVIDIA A5000 GPUs
- *Oelek - a Linux NFS storage server that supports Badjak.
These servers, in turn, are nodes in the G2 Computing Cluster, which currently consists of 195 servers (82 CPU-only servers and 113 GPU servers) consisting of ~7400 CPU cores and 698 GPUs.
The G2 Cluster uses the SLURM Workload Manager for submitting batch jobs that can run on any available server or GPU on any cluster node.
Articulate Instruments - Micro Speech Research Ultrasound System
We use this Articulate Instruments Micro Speech Research Ultrasound System to investigate how fine-grained variation in speech articulation connects to phonological structure.
The ultrasound system is portable and non-invasive, making it ideal for collecting articulatory data in the field.
BIOPAC MP-160 System
The Sound Booth Laboratory has a BIOPAC MP-160 system for physiological data collection. This system supports two BIOPAC Respiratory Effort Transducers and their associated interface modules.
Language Corpora
- The Cornell Linguistics Department has more than 880 language corpora from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), consisting of high-quality text, audio, and video corpora in more than 60 languages. In addition, we receive three to four new language corpora per month under an LDC license maintained by the Cornell Library.
- This Linguistic Department web page lists all our holdings, as well as our licensed non-LDC corpora.
- These and other corpora are available to Cornell students, staff, faculty, post-docs, and visiting scholars for research in the broad area of "natural language processing", which of course includes all ongoing Phonetics Lab research activities.
- This Confluence wiki page - only available to Cornell faculty & students - outlines the corpora access procedures for faculty supervised research.
Speech Aerodynamics
Studies of the aerodynamics of speech production are conducted with our Glottal Enterprises oral and nasal airflow and pressure transducers.
Electroglottography
We use a Glottal Enterprises EG-2 electroglottograph for noninvasive measurement of vocal fold vibration.
Real-time vocal tract MRI
Our lab is part of the Cornell Speech Imaging Group (SIG), a cross-disciplinary team of researchers using real-time magnetic resonance imaging to study the dynamics of speech articulation.
Articulatory movement tracking
We use the Northern Digital Inc. Wave motion-capture system to study speech articulatory patterns and motor control.
Sound Booth
Our isolated sound recording booth serves a range of purposes--from basic recording to perceptual, psycholinguistic, and ultrasonic experimentation.
We also have the necessary software and audio interfaces to perform low latency real-time auditory feedback experiments via MATLAB and Audapter.
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