When the COVID-19 pandemic halted in-person data collection, many linguists adopted new online technologies to replace traditional methods, including video conferencing applications (apps) like Zoom (Zoom Video Communications, San Jose, CA), which allow live interaction with remote participants. This study evaluated the suitability of video calls for the phonetic analysis of vowel configurations, mergers, and nasalization by comparing simultaneous recordings from three popular video conferencing apps (Zoom; Microsoft Skype, Redmond, WA; Microsoft Teams, Redmond, WA) to those taken from professional equipment (H4n field recorder) and an offline iPad (Apple, Cupertino, CA) identical to those running the apps. All three apps conveyed vowel arrangements and nasalization patterns relatively faithfully, but absolute measurements varied, particularly for the female speaker and in the 750–1500 Hz range, which affected the locations (F1 × F2) of low and back vowels and reduced nasalization measurements (A1-P0) for the female's prenasal vowels. Based on these results, we assess the validity of remote recording using these apps and offer recommendations for the best practices for collecting high fidelity acoustic phonetic data from a distance.
References
1.
123apps, LLC
. (2020
). “Online audio converter
,” available at https://online-audio-converter.com (Last viewed 2/8/21).2.
Akamai Technologies
. (2017
). “Average internet connection speed in the United States from 2007 to 2017 (in Mbps), by quarter
,” available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-connection-speed-in-the-us/ (Last viewed 2/8/21).3.
Anderson
, W.
(2020
). “You can finally trust computer audio with Zoom's VoIP service,” available at
https://blog.zoom.us/reliable-computer-audio-zoom-voip-service/ (Last viewed 2/8/21).4.
Androutsopoulos
, J.
, and Staehr
, A
. (2018
). “Moving methods online
,” in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity
, edited by A.
Creese
and A.
Blackledge
(Routledge
, New York
), pp. 118
–132
.5.
Arbuthnot
, T.
(2018
). “What are thresholds for good and poor network packet loss, jitter and round trip time for unified communications?
,” available at https://tomtalks.blog/2018/05/what-are-thresholds-for-good-and-poor-network-packet-loss-jitter-and-round-trip-time-for-unified-communications/ (Last viewed 2/8/21).6.
Archibald
, M. M.
, Ambagtsheer
, R. C.
, Casey
, M. G.
, and Lawless
, M.
(2019
). “Using Zoom videoconferencing for qualitative data collection: Perceptions and experiences of researchers and participants
,” Int. J. Qual. Methods
18
, 160940691987459
.7.
Bakos
, J.
(2013
). “Comparison of the speech patterns and dialect attitudes of Oklahoma
,” Doctoral dissertation, Oklahoma State University
.8.
Bates
, D.
, Mächler
, M.
, Bolker
, B.
, and Walker
, S.
(2015
). “Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4
,” J. Stat. Software
67
(1
), 1
–48
.9.
Boersma
, P.
, and Weenink
, D.
(2020
). “Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (version 6.1.16) [computer program]
,” http://www.praat.org/ (Last viewed 2/8/21).10.
Byrne
, C.
, and Foulkes
, P.
(2007
). “The ‘mobile phone effect’ on vowel formants
,” Int. J. Speech Lang. Law
11
(1
), 83
–102
. 11.
Bulgin
, J.
, De Decker
, P.
, and Nycz
, J.
(2010
). “Reliability of formant measurements from lossy compressed audio
,” in British Association of Academic Phoneticians Colloquium
(University of West Minister
, London, UK)
.12.
Chen
, M. Y.
(2000
). “Acoustic analysis of simple vowels preceding a nasal in Standard Chinese
,” J. Phonetics
28
(1
), 43
–67
.13.
Clopper
, A. J.
, Baccei
, E. C.
, and Sel
, T. J.
(2020
). “An evaluation of Zoom and Microsoft Teams video conferencing software with network packet loss and latency
,” available at https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/iqp-all/5687 (Last viewed 2/8/21).14.
Cohn
, A. C.
(1993
). “Nasalisation in English: Phonology or phonetics
,” in Phonology
10
(1
), 43
–81
; available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4615427 (Last viewed 2/8/21)15.
De Decker
, P.
, and Nycz
, J.
(2011
). “For the record: Which digital media can be used for sociophonetic analysis?
,” Univ. Pa. Work. Pap. Linguist.
17
(2
), 51
–59
.16.
De Decker
, P.
(2014
). “The short-a nasal system: How does it get so tense
?,” Poster presented at the Canadian Linguistics Association Annual Meeting
, Brock University
, St. Catharines, Ontario
, available at
(Last viewed 2/8/21).17.
Government of Canada
. (2020
). “What you should know about internet speeds
,” available at https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/internet/performance.htm (Last viewed August 13, 2020
).18.
Labov
, W.
(1984
). “Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation
,” in Language in Use
, edited by J.
Baugh
and J.
Sherzer
(Prentice Hall
, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
).19.
Labov
, W.
, Ash
, S.
, and Boberg
, C.
(2006
). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change: A Multimedia Reference Tool
(de Gruyter
, Berlin
).20.
Lupton
, D.
(ed.) (2020
). “Doing fieldwork in a pandemic
,” available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1clGjGABB2h2qbduTgfqribHmog9B6P0NvMgVuiHZCl8/edit (Last viewed 2/8/21).21.
Mayorga
, P.
, Besacier
, L.
, Lamy
, R.
, and Serignat
, J.-F.
(2003
). “Audio packet loss over IP and speech recognition
,” in 2003 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (IEEE Cat. No.03EX721)
, pp. 607
–612
.22.
Mok
, R. K.
, Chan
, E. W.
, and Chang
, R. K.
(2011
). “Measuring the quality of experience of HTTP video streaming
,” in 12th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2011) and Workshops
, pp. 485
–492
.23.
McCloy
, D.
(2016
). “phonR: Tools for phoneticians and phonologists
,”
R package version 1.0-7
, available at https://rdrr.io/cran/phonR/ (Last viewed 2/8/21).24.
Nycz
, J.
, and Hall-Lew
, L.
(2013
). “Best practices in measuring vowel merger
,” Proc. Mtgs. Acoust.
20
, 060008
. 25.
R Core Team.
(2020
). “R: A language and environment for statistical computing
” (version 4.0.2) (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria), available at https://www.R-project.org/ (Last viewed 2/8/21).26.
Rasmussen
, J.
(2013
). “What is the basis for classifying a call as poor in Lync 2013 QoE?,” available at
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jenstr/what-is-the-basis-for-classifying-a-call-as-poor-in-lync-2013-qoe (Last viewed 2/8/21).27.
Reddy
, S.
, and Stanford
, J.
(2015
). “A Web application for automated dialect analysis
,” in Proceedings of NAACL-HLT
(IEEE
, New York
).28.
Rogue Amoeba.
(2020
). “Loopback 2.1.4
,” released on March 24, 2020, available at https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/ (Last viewed June 15, 2020).29.
Salazar
, M.
(2020
). “What's new in Microsoft Teams: 3rd anniversary edition
,” available at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-3rd-anniversary-edition/ba-p/1234871 (Last viewed August 24, 2020).30.
Singmann
, H.
, Bolker
, B.
, Westfall
, J.
, Aust
, F.
, and Ben-Shachar
, M. S.
(2020
). “afex: Analysis of factorial experiments
,” R package version 0.27-2, available at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=afex (Last viewed 2/8/21).31.
Styler
, W.
, and Scarborough
, R.
(2018
). “Nasality automeasure script package” [Praat script], available at
https://github.com/stylerw/styler_praat_scripts (Last viewed 2/8/21).32.
Thomas
, E. R.
, and Kendall
, K.
(2007
). “NORM: The vowel normalization and plotting suite (version 1.1)
,” available at http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/norm/norm1.php (Last viewed 2/8/21).© 2021 Acoustical Society of America.
2021
Acoustical Society of America
You do not currently have access to this content.
