Newsletter – volume 9 – September 2019

Reminder: Don’t forget about the Hurricane Challenge 2.0, which is largely supported by ENRICH (especially Edinburgh, Vitoria and Oldenburg), and in which all ESRs working on related issues (speech enhancement, synthetic speech) should take part if possible!

Amy: has had a busy September, presenting posters at the ICA in Aachen and the Aesop symposium in Leuven (no photos unfortunately!) She was very happy to see everyone at the early careers event and hopes it has sparked some new ideas and motivation for post-ENRICH life. She’ll be sending out a short survey soon for feedback.

Carol: is very proud to have won third prize at the 5-minute Research Story Competition at ICA as well ISCA Best Student Paper Award at Interspeech 2019.

Katherine: will be giving a talk at Acoustics Week in Canada 2019. While there she will also run her perception study (to study the Lombard intelligibility benefit) with native listeners. While in Vitoria in March, she tested Spanish listeners (non-native). Dutch listeners (non-native) have also completed the perception study. She is excited to have all her data and analyze it!

Chen: is planning on carrying out her secondment at UCL in London during the last week of November (pending UK visa approval). She is excited to be presenting some acoustic results from her second study on Lombard speech from a large sample of 78 speakers, and exchange research ideas with the PhDs as well as the PIs there at UCL.

Gerard: Great to see you all in ICA! Gerard is currently doing his secondment in BCBL, helping another PhD student with the code and design of a dual task for listening effort in non-native, synthesized and audiovisual speech. He finished all his German courses and will start his Master this October while he writes the results of the experiments. He hopes to see you soon!

Max: headed directly from Graz (Interspeech 2019) to Zürich for his secondment at Sonova. He will continue measuring pupil responses to degraded speech, but this time with hearing aid users. He is using a mix of time-compressed and reverberant speech.