Summer School 2021, "Contemporary Phonetics and Phonology":

Recent developments in the Phonetics of Prosody

Dafydd Gibbon, U Bielefeld

Lectures:
  1. 2021-07-22 Semiotics of prosody: categories and their interpretations [PDF]
    The rhythm and melody of speech are signs with semantic and phonetic interpretations. This lecture looks at prosodic categories, meanings and forms in the context of the architecture of language, from speech sounds through words and their constituents to sentences and discourse prosody, each with their own principles of interpretation. Examples are taken from Sinitic and also African and Indo-European languages and analysed from a 'new descriptivism' perspective.
    Prospective participants are also invited to supply examples from 'their' languages for discussion.

  2. 2021-07-24 Speech rhythm and the role of melody [PDF]
    Rhythm is a topic which touches on music and dance as well as speech, and metaphorically on many other kinds of regularly varying event. The phonetics of syllable, word, phrase and discourse rhythms and their variation are discussed in detail, also with reference to other domains, with inductive computation of the rhythm spectrum, the rhythm spectrogram and rhythm formants, from both the speech waveform and the fundamental frequency track, independently of speech segmentation and annotation.
    Results from different languages, including those which may be supplied by particpants, are compared with a hierarchical classifier.

  3. 2021-07-25 Prosodic phonetics: looking behind the scenes [PDF]
    Theories of the production and perception phases of prosodic performance are rather well known, but transmission theory is usually left to the audio engineers. This gap in phonetics is filled in the lecture by a gentle introduction to Modulation Theory and its application to prosody. This approach is applied to a 'do-it-yourself' approach to phonetic software using well-known methods, as an alternative to using ready-made off-the-shelf applications.
    Participants who wish to do so will be able to download examples of this kind of software in the Python language, but for the lecture itself no programming experience is required.
Zoom:ID and password will available on the WeChat feedback channel (see below) immediately before each lecture.
You can use Zoom chat for immediate feedback during the lecture.
You can also use the Summer School Tencent connection. In this case, your questions will be put indirectly and relayed to me as soon as possible by the organiser.
Feedback: WeChat channel for questions during and after the lectures if you prefer not to use Zoom.
Download: Demo Software for use during and after the lecture (and as a starting point for developing your own phonetic software).