Dan McCarthy, PhD Speech Sciences
Email: d.mccarthy@newcastle.ac.uk
Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Mccarthy9 & https://newcastle.academia.edu/DanMcCarthy

Acoustic Phonetics

Processing Formant Transitions to Recognize Place of Articulation: My research aims to identify plosives’ place of articulation using fewer, higher-quality features than used conventionally. There are two cues for identifying place of articulation, the formant transitions and the release burst. For the formants, I am developing a technique to shrink the number of features needed to describe formant transitions to yield new, more orthogonal features for identifying place of articulation. For the burst, I am testing a number of techniques, among them: rather than using the absolute amplitudes in frequency channels, I am weighting them by their relative information density, which results in a standard-deviation attribute that classifies place of articulation more accurately than the non-weighted equivalent.
Other interests: dialectology, hearing science, auditory neuroscience, evolutionary biology.