The Phonetics of Impersonation
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Project director:
- Anders Eriksson Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University.
- Project title:
- The Phonetics of Impersonation.
- Project Period:
- 1/7/1998 -
- Funding agency:
- The project is carried out without external funding.
- Project abstract:
- The aim of the project is to make a detailed description of the phonetics of impersonation and to explore possible applications of this knowledge in the fields of forensic phonetics and automatic speakeridentification/recognition.
- Current state of the project:
- The database used in the project consists, at present, of recordings of three target speeches, imitations of these speeches and versions of the same linguistic material spoken in the imitators' own natural voices and speaking styles.
The target material consists of approximately 30 s long excerpts of uninterrupted speech by three well-known Swedish public figures (Carl Bildt, Leif 'Loket' Olsson, Bo Parnevik) recorded from radio/TV shows.
Imitations and natural voice recordings include one set of recordings of a professional Swedish impersonation artist imitating all three speeches. In addition 8 amateurs have been recorded imitating selected phrases from thespeech by speaker Bildt.
The data have been subject to various acoustic analyses, described in the papers cited below.
- Project staff:
- Pär Wretling, Research assistant, Department of Phonetics, Umeå University.
- Other people who have helped/are helping in the project:
- A professional Swedish impersonation artist, Göran Gabrielsson, has provided invaluable help in the formof recordings, personal advice an views on various topics of impersonation.
- References:
- Wretling, P. 1997. Imitation–En fonetisk studie av timing, intonation och vokalkvalitet vid imitation. C-uppsats. Umeå University: Dept. of Phonetics.
- Eriksson, A. & P. Wretling. 1997. How flexible is the human voice? - A case study of mimicry. In Proc. EUROSPEECH '97, Vol. 2, 1043-1046. pdf.
- Wretling, P. & A. Eriksson. 1998. Is articulatory timing speaker specific? - Evidence from imitated voices.In Proc. FONETIK '98, 48-52. pdf.
Last modified: Tue Jul 01 08:42:23 MET DST 2003