Linguistics Colloquium Series: "Voice quality’s acoustic landscape within and across languages" - Mykel Brinkerhoff (University of Washington)
This talk explores a framework for analyzing voice quality and identifying the acoustic measures most relevant to capturing the phonetic distinctions among different voice qualities. The framework involves a two-step process: first, conducting a multidimensional scaling analysis to determine which acoustic measures are most closely correlated to the different dimensions; second, performing a random forest analysis to identify the measures most important for distinguishing between phonation types. By combining these analyses, we can pinpoint the acoustic measures that are both statistically significant and phonetically meaningful, focusing on where the two methods converge. These results are compared with Keating et al.’s (2023) paper on the acoustic landscape of voice quality, showing that the results they found hold with more acoustic data and also when comparing speakers within a single language.
The results also highlight several key areas to consider when analyzing voice quality. Two well-established area…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Smith Hall (SMI). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/99630029007?pwd=ekZYTU5rUkFjSWtoUnhKMUVKTGxFQT09. Campus room: Smith Hall 105. Accessibility Contact: Andrew Hedding. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, November 21, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Linguistics Faculty Meeting
Linguistics faculty meeting.
ASL interpretation will be provided.
*Note: Date of January meeting may change.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Guggenheim Hall (GUG). Campus room: GUG 415 L. Accessibility Contact: linguw@uw.edu. Event Types: Meetings.
Friday, January 16, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Linguistics Colloquium Series: Edith Aldridge (University of Washington)
Abstract to come.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: Andrew Hedding. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, February 13, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.