Some acceptance news for 2022

I have some exciting news to share for this year (whose first month is already over apparently): I got accepted to a bunch of interesting things, namely ESSV2022, Speech Prosody, and a summer school on Coping with the complexity in speech production and perception! Chronologically, there are:

• 2-4 March, I will be in virtual Sønderborg for ESSV2022, giving a poster presentation on 2 experiments I did with Jürgen Trouvain, Beeke Muhlack, and Bernd Möbius on "Perceptual categorization of breath noises in speech pauses".
• 23-26 May, I will be at the potentially in-person Speech Prosody 2022, presenting a poster on "Optionality and variability of speech pauses in read speech across languages and rates", which I did with Jürgen Trouvain and Bernd Möbius.
• 4-8 July, I will be at the very summery winter school on complexity in production and perception in Chorin. Very much looking forward to hearing the talks there and talking to many interesting people!

Let’s hope that the events currently planned as in-person events can be held as such!

P&P 2021

This year’s P&P 17 in virtual Frankfurt is over and was a pleasure as usual. Although I’m sure everyone’s pretty tired of online conferences by now (yet some people still haven’t learned what a mute button is), P&P was very enjoyable. They based their infrastructure on last year’s P&P who already did an extremely good job as one of the earlier online conferences. The combination of zoom for talks and gather.town for poster presentations is a very good fit for smaller conferences in my opinion.

Personally, I got to see loads of interesting talks & posters and - through my PINTS glasses - it is wonderful to see that other people are working on breathing and/or pauses, too! My poster on “Breath noise perception – a pilot study on airway usage” was very busy (even had to go 20mins overtime) and there were some fruitful discussions and useful suggestions that I need to think about the next days.

Interspeech 2021 acceptance

It’s been quite a while since I have posted on here (mainly because I used twitter for announcing smaller updates) but there is some wonderful news concerning this year’s Interspeech. Among the 6 papers from our department that were accepted were 3 papers from the PINTS project! They are:

• Werner, R., Fuchs, S., Trouvain, J., & Möbius, B. (2021). Inhalations in speech: acoustic and physiological characteristics. Interspeech 2021, 30 Aug-3 Sep, Brno.
• Muhlack, B., Elmers, M., Drenhaus, H., Trouvain, J., van Os, M., Werner, R., Ryzhova, M., & Möbius, B. (2021). Revisiting recall effects of filler particles in German and English. Interspeech 2021, 30 Aug-3 Sep, Brno.
• Elmers, M., Werner, R., Muhlack, B., Möbius, B., & Trouvain, J. (2021). Take a breath: Respiratory sounds improve recollection in synthetic speech. Interspeech 2021, 30 Aug-3 Sep, Brno.

I’m looking forward to representing the pause-internals :)

ISSP 2020

My last working week for this year I was mostly busy with the International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP). It was the last one after a couple of online conferences (including occasional mixed feelings) in 2020 but I really enjoyed the format. Not only did they hold the majority of contributions as poster presentations (which I think is much better than sitting through hundreds of short versions of talks), they also introduced double slots, i.e. every poster slot would happen twice which catered for different time zones but also allowed me to spend some more time on a session that was particularly interesting to me.

Personally, I was involved in a poster (Exploring the presence and absence of inhalation noises when speaking and when listening with J. Trouvain, S. Fuchs, and B. Möbius; poster and paper to be linked in Publications) and greatly enjoyed the discussions there and at other posters.

Overall, it was probably the best format I’ve seen in an online conference so far with some highly interesting talks, engaging discussions, an online concert, and many things I learned.

Interspeech 2020

This year’s Interspeech was not only the first Interspeech to be held as a virtual event but also my first Interspeech. The organizers in Shanghai did a great job at translating such a huge conference to the virtual space while catering for different time zones.

Personally, I profited the most from the longer events, such as the tutorials by Tatsuya Kawahara & Roger K. Moore, all the keynotes, and of course the events organized by the ISCA-SAC. I got to participate in a mentoring event on time management for PhD students with very helpful advice by Carol Espy-Wilson and Sarah Levitan and the students meet experts event, in which Jon Barker, Tara Sainath, Björn Schuller, and Sunayana Sitaram gave some interesting insights into their work in academia and the industry.

Finally, my fellow PhD students at UdS Iona Gessinger and Eran Raveh received the ISCA Award for Best Student Paper at Interspeech 2020 for their paper on ‘Phonetic Accommodation of L2 German Speakers to the Virtual Language Learning Tutor Mirabella’.