Source(s)
UTI (Ultrasound Tongue Imaging system) takes a series of images at a frame rate of 121 fps that are complied into a video format to show the visual movement of individual’s tongues, lips, and mouth. It involves multiple people from around the world that speak English. Includes video of the ultrasound, people and their biographical information, and audio of their speech pronunciation patterns.
Process
Taking people from all over the world who speak English they hook them up to “a high-speed Sonix RP ultrasound machine was used with automatic audio-ultrasound synchronization, recording at 121 frames per second.” Articulate Assistant Advanced (AAA) software version 2.16.12 was used to record simultaneous audio and UTI. A “short-handled microconvex probe set to an angle of 150°” was attached to a stabilizing headset on participants to record their outer faces simultaneously as well. Video from the UTI is compiled with the facial video and the audio to form one singular playable video and audio format. Words were displayed as text via a screen to the speakers to iterate aloud. Audio was recorded using an “Audio Technica directional clip-on microphone” attached to the side of the headset.
Presentation
They chose to display their findings in 2 different ways. “Accent Map” in the form of a map that allows users to interact with a world map that has the speakers linked to pinpoint dots placed where their accent is from. This links to both the UTI video with integrated face recordings as well as audio from the video. after selecting the dot location there is a list of all words that participants said with the base word being spontaneous across all locations no matter the number of participants. “Accent Chart” is a large chart containing all biographical data of the person (town and country, age range, gender) with all their recordings of different words. Each row is another person and column is a different data point (gender, word, town).
I think this is really interesting personally because I am interested in linguistics and as such the different entomologies of words and language origins. This project allows for people to analyze different accents side by side, with not only their auditory differences but also their physical differences which is not typically available. I think connecting this with history and linguistics can show some interesting features of the past and how the world has developed into what it is today. For example, the British colonized North America in the 16th century leading to mass migrations over the next several hundred years this leads to many people with British English accents to migrate to North America. Later on however, there was a revolution causing a distinct identity split and independence for the newly formed USA, this causes southern accents to be closest to British accents. However because of the large French and German presence in the American north north this causes their accents to flatten and merge with their own. It is interesting to see the actual physical differences and influences of different accents on one another.
