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School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

Linguistics PhonLab meeting: Adib Mehrabi (QMUL)

9 October 2018

Time: 10:00 - 11:00am
Venue: Bancroft G07

Adib Mehrabi, our phonetics lab manager, will present:

Beyond speech: on vocal imitation of synthesised sounds and musical instruments

Music practitioners often express sonic ideas and concepts using non-verbal vocalisations, but very little research exists on how accurately people can vocalise musical sounds, or how effectively sonic ideas may be communicated using the voice. In this talk two studies will be presented. The first addresses the accuracy with which musicians can imitate synthesised sounds varying in pitch, loudness, and spectral shape, from a computational perspective. The second study investigates vocal imitations of real drum sounds, in terms of the perceptual accuracy of the vocalisations and whether lay listeners can identify the sounds being imitated from the vocalisations.