Sound
The Northwestern University Linguistics Department is a leader in experimental phonetics and laboratory phonology. The lab complex consists of the following main areas:
- A recording studio in Swift 228
- A speech perception lab in Swift 228
- A speech production lab in Cresap 105
- Documents and meeting room in Cresap 101
- General office areas in Swift 309/310 and Cresap 115
Phonetics and phonology research and discussion groups within our department include:
- Phonatics Discussion Group
- The Speech Communication Group (Ann Bradlow, PI)
- The Sound Lab (Matt Goldrick, PI)
- Prosody & Speech Dynamics Lab (Jennifer Cole, PI)
- SocioGroup (Annette D'Onofrio, PI)
Researchers in the Department maintain the SpeechBox resource which provides a searchable set of speech recordings tagged with rich annotations.
Technical advice and support, as well as work on the development of the computational infrastructure, are provided by the Tech Consultant, Chun-Liang Chan.
Swift 228: Recording Studio
The Swift 228 recording studio consists of a double-walled sound-treated booth for high quality speech recording. Equipment includes:
- Two 17-inch Intel Core Duo iMacs, 1.83GHz, 1GB ram each.
- Two MOTU Ultralight external audio interfaces for recording and playback
- Sound Studio 3 audio recording software
- Sony MDR-7506 Studio Monitor Headphones
- Presonus Headphone Amp
- 19-inch Acer widescreen monitor in the recording booth for presenting visuals to the subject
- Marantz PMD 670 flash recorder with a firewire card reader for transferring sound files from PMD 670 to disk
- 1 AKG C420 headset microphones
- Stereo-to-XLR converter for "TriggerWave" application
Cresap 101: Computing and Presentation Facilities
- Presentations: A ceiling mounted projector with screen, PC laptop and small speakers available for presentations. The remote control for the projector along with a dongle for hooking up Mac laptops is in the rightmost cabinet along the north wall of the room.
- Computing Facilities: Two old Mac computers are available for classroom demonstrations or sound analysis (Praat is installed on both). A new Mac (fisher) is also available; it is used primarily for web design, corpus/database analysis, and simulations.
Swift 310: Data Storage and Processing
The Swift 310 collection of computers consists of:
- Polyglot: a desktop computer whose main purposes are (1) speech database storage and (2) data processing using Matlab and various utilities for adding noise to and leveling stimuli. [NB: Polyglot is currently housed in Swift 228.]
- A portable perception testing setup including a laptop (Cantonese 2), with headphones
Cresap 115: Computing Facilities
The Cresap 115 collection of computers consists of:
- Dalek: a Mac G4 whose main purposes are (1) data storage (2) data processing (3) simulation (4) corpus/ database processing
- A firewire card reader for transferring sound files from PMD 670 to disk The desk under Dalek is for storage of SoundLab related consent and subject information forms (lower left hand drawer).