MRI: Acquisition of Instrumentation to Support a Multi-disciplinary Acoustic Laboratory for Faculty and Student Research at Union College

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The objective of this project is to set up a multi-disciplinary acoustics laboratory that enables research in speech and musical acoustics, as well as the development of new visualization techniques. In the first project the signals from musical instruments are measured and used to develop graphical techniques for the visualization of complex data. In the second project acoustic recordings are made and analyzed to determine how and when children develop individual acoustic contrasts that define a speech segment sound. The system supports acoustically sensitive recordings necessary for the research objectives.Intellectual Merit: The data visualization system is important because it transforms dispersed data patterns into moving patterns that are significantly easier for the human eye to detect and process. Potential applications exist in other systems at the macro, micro, and nanometer levels. The second project will contribute to a longitudinal database of children's speech. Volume and clarity are quite variable in child speech, and these variations adversely affect analysis. The sensitive recordings obtained in this laboratory offset the adversity. The recordings and their analysis have implications for researchers in linguistics, psychology, and electrical engineering, and may lead to improved diagnosis and treatment of communication disorders, among other things. Broader Impacts: The laboratory increases teaching and research training opportunities for engineering undergraduates at Union College. The database of child speech will be made available to other researchers. In addition, the laboratory is being incorporated into Union's academic and summer programs aimed at students from disadvantaged and under-represented backgrounds.