Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.38003/zrffs.13.10
METHODOLOGY FOR ACOUSTIC RECORDING
Iva Bašić
orcid.org/0000-0002-2171-9300
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Zdravka Biočina
orcid.org/0000-0002-8262-9528
; Zagreb School of Economy and Management, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Sociolinguistics and sociophonetics place the native speaker in the center of their
research. Since different research goals demand a different methodological setting
it is very important to assess which steps are necessary and sufficient to answer
the research questions. Thus the authors of this paper recorded more than 300
speakers, which gave them ample methodological experience but also opened a lot
of questions. In many previous studies, the importance of the optimal conditions
of recording which contribute to a spontaneous spoken reaction of the speaker is
emphasised, especially for the purpose of collecting audio material of dialect speech.
The influences of different speaking styles, microphone distance (Vermeulen 2009;
Fraser 2017) and head position (Jovičić et al. 2015) on acoustical parameters in
English, Dutch, Serbian, etc. ware examined in a smaller number of acoustic studies.
This paper will look into conditions of acoustic recording and their influence on
different acoustic parameters (formant frequencies and fundamental frequency).
For the purposes of this research two speakers (one male and one female voice)
with a healthy voice and speech and language development were recorded. In the
first part of the research, the speakers read a short text, while in the second part
spontaneous speech was recorded. Both speakers were recorded in the morning and
in the afternoon in two different settings: in a sound booth and in a room with a
lower noise level, both with a high-quality recorder. The speakers were also recorded
at a different distance from the microphone and with different head positions.
Three research questions were formulated: will different a) terms of recording b)
conditions of recording and c) distance and head position relative to the microphone
influence the values of formant frequencies and the fundamental frequency? Apart
from that, this paper will emphasize the methodological details that should be taken
into consideration while collecting audio material for acoustic analysis purposes.
From the fundamental frequency measurements, the basic value and median have
been shown to be the most robust, and from the formant frequencies. the third
formant. The most significant differences between values are in the non-optimal
distance of the speaker from the microphone. This research aims to contribute to the
clarification of specific acoustic issues and to facilitate future researchers to set up
the necessary methodological settings in sociolinguistic, sociophonetic and phoneticforensic
studies due to their undoubted influence on data analysis and results.
Keywords
sociolinguistics; acoustic recording; methodology; fundamental frequency; formant frequencies
Hrčak ID:
248013
URI
Publication date:
17.12.2020.
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