Speech prosody and remote experiments: a technical report
This addresses the problem of remote data collection for speech prosody researchers, but it is incremental as it reviews and compares existing tools without introducing new methods.
The paper reviews recording options for prosodic data collection when fieldwork is impractical, testing methods with noise and frequency analysis, and identifies Zencastr as the most affordable and practical platform for acoustic data.
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present a review of different recording options for gathering prosodic data in the event that fieldwork is impracticable (e.g. due to pandemics). Under this light, we mimic a long-distance reading task experiment using different software and hardware synchronously. In order to evaluate the employed methodologies, we extract noise levels and frequency manipulation of the recordings. Subsequently, we examine the impact of the different recordings onto linguistic variables, such as the pitch curves and values. We also include a discussion on experimental practicalities. After balancing these factors, we decree an online platform, Zencastr, as the most affordable and practical for acoustic data collection. Secondly, we want to open up a debate on the most optimal remote methodology that researchers on speech prosody can deploy.