Vincent Hughes

I am looking for a post-doctoral Research Associate to work on my new ESRC-funded project ‘Person-specific automatic speaker recognition’. This role requires a background in linguistics, specifically any/all of forensic speech science, phonetics, and sociophonetics. The position is fixed term for 27 months starting from 1st June 2022. More information about the position and how…

I am really pleased to announce that the project ‘Person-specific automatic speaker recognition: understanding the behaviour of individuals for applications of ASR’ has been awarded funding by the ESRC. I’ll be working with CIs, Paul Foulkes and Philip Harrison, as well as two project partners, the UK Ministry of Defence and the Netherlands Forensic Institute,…

I am looking for a post-doc research associate to work on my AHRC project ‘Humans and machines: novel methods for testing speaker recognition performance‘. The position is full time for 13 months, based in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at York. The role involves contributing towards computer game design, running human experiments online…

Carmen Llamas and I have been awarded an AHRC Early Career Grant for our project ‘Humans and machines: novel methods for testing speaker recognition performance’. The project will compare the performance of lay listeners and automatic speaker recognition systems at distinguishing between same- and different-speaker pairs of voices, as well as examining the effect of…

A group including myself, George Bailey, Amelia Gully, Eleanor Chodroff (Linguistics), Helena Daffern (Electronic Engineering), and Nick Pears (Computer Science) have been awarded Research Priming funding by the University of York to purchase an electromagnetic articulograph and ultrasound. The equipment will be used to explore shared interests in understanding and modelling the vocal tract for…

Jessica Wormald (J P French and University of York) and I have been awarded a grant (£1300) from the International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) to create a wiki for descriptions of language varieties that can be used, amongst other things, by forensic speech scientists as a resource when assessing typicality in casework. The…

We are currently looking for a student for a collaborative project between the Forensic Speech Science group at the University of York and Aculab, a commercial company developing state-of-the-art speaker verification and recognition systems. The funding is provided by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities. The project attempts to systematically integrate linguistic-phonetic and automatic…

Peter French and I have done an episode of the Story of Things podcast on voice recognition. We talk to Penny Spikins about different methods of forensic voice analysis (linguistic-phonetic and automatic), and our AHRC-funded project, Voice and Identity. We also analyse some recordings of Penny’s speech using the different methods to arrive at a forensic…

Jessica Wormald, Erica Gold and I ran a workshop on data- and knowledge-sharing across sociolinguistics and forensic speech science at NWAV46 in Madison, WI, last week. The workshop consisted of a practical session involving the phonetic analysis of forensically realistic recordings, as well as talks by Yvan Rose, Tyler Kendall, and Natalie Schilling. More information…

Last week I was made an Associate Member of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI) working group on Forensic Speech and Audio at a meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. You can find out more about the working group here.