Dafydd Gibbon
Bielefeld University, Germany
ABSTRACT
Computers are never a substitute for people, in teaching, science, or any other walk of life. But they are tools which open up many avenues of activity which would otherwise be inaccessible, because they can sometimes usefully speed things up, slow things down, or magnify objects and events in visual and acoustic media. This is true both of academic phonetics and applied phonetics, which are both areas in which the use of computers encourages a rapprochement between theory and practice to a hitherto unknown degree, combining theoretical consistency and precision with down-to-earth practical and operational skills. In this talk I will discuss experiences with the course "How to handle speech" developed at U Bielefeld over the past 5 years by Julie Berndsen, Ulrike Gut and myself, in which practical aspects of phonetics are taught using readily available software, with reference to modern tasks like the construction of talking dictionaries, and the annotation of digital speech recordings, yielding proficiency not only in the theory and practice of phonetics but also skills in handling modern digital media.
Full presentation content here.
