Papers by Massimo Pettorino
Spoken Communication and the Mass Media
Vocalizzazioni e aree vocaliche in tre aree regionali dell’italiano
Transplanting vowels towards the acoustic correlates of foreign accent
Fonética experimental, educación superior e investigación, Vol. 2, 2014 (Adquisición y aprendizaje de lenguas / Español como lengua extranjera), ISBN 978-84-7635-884-9, págs. 93-106, 2014
Prosodia e italiano L2: cinesi, giapponesi e vietnamiti a confronto
Guerra, 2011
La comunicazione parlata : atti del congresso internazionale, Napoli, 23-25 febbraio 2006
The most famous talking statue of the past is the “colossus of Memnon”, the sandstone colossus st... more The most famous talking statue of the past is the “colossus of Memnon”, the sandstone colossus still rising over 65 feet in front of Luxor, the ancient Thebes. For about two centuries, at dawn, when the sun rays touched the statue, a plaintive sound came out of the stone. The 108 epigraphs carved on the legs of the colossus, together with the words of Strabo, Tacitus and Pausanias, are the reliable witnesses of the phenomenon. Up to now, among the various hypotheses, the most common ascribes the sound to natural causes, such as the temperature, the rarefaction of the air and so on. The results of recent researches give a new interpretation of the fact. A careful exam of the chronology of the epigraphs confirms that the death of Antinous, Hadrian’s favourite, has to do with the secret of the statue.
Wolfgang R. von Kempelen, Le Mécanisme de la Parole, Suivi de la Description d’une Machine Parlante . Vienne, ed. Bauer, 1791
Phonetica, 2020
Strange as it may seem, von Kempelen’s speaking machine from 1791 is the best result obtained in ... more Strange as it may seem, von Kempelen’s speaking machine from 1791 is the best result obtained in various attempts to build a mechanism similar to the speech apparatus, capable of producing a vocal signal. In this book discussion, we will illustrate von Kempelen’s work, along with the attempts, across history, to build talking devices. We will highlight the 2 paths that have been followed over the centuries: “vocal transport” and “artificial voice.” The first case was a trick, because the voice was produced by a hidden subject and transported through an artifice to a head or a statue. The other path, that of research, has tried to imitate the phonatory apparatus to produce sequences of sounds somewhat similar to those that make up the speech chain. Which of the 2 paths led to the production of today’s synthesized speech? The trick or the research? We will try to answer this question.
Data presented here and discussed in detail confirm that speech in film dubbing is somewhat artif... more Data presented here and discussed in detail confirm that speech in film dubbing is somewhat artificial and presents unnatural prosodic rhythmic features. This is the requirement that the dubber is forced to comply with in order to match sound and image. On the basis of previous data on dubbed Italian, in the present paper we have analysed dubbed English (having Italian as its source language). Following our analysis, we pose a series of hypotheses to be verified in further studies. All of them underline the important role played by translation, in which different strategies are adopted according to the different target language and to the different kinds of shot. In fact, as far as close-up shots are concerned, synchrony is obtained increasing the amount of silence, rather than decelerating articulation rate. This does not happen in the rest of the corpus, where a different strategy is employed.
The history of talking heads: the trick and the research
This study reviews the history of the attempts to build talking statues or talking heads. The stu... more This study reviews the history of the attempts to build talking statues or talking heads. The study highlights the two paths that have been followed over the centuries: the “voice transport” and the “artificial voice”. The first case was ultimately a trick, because the voice was actually produced by a hidden subject and transported through an artifice to a fake head, so that the voice appeared to come out of the mouth of the statue. The other path, that of research, tried to imitate the human phonation apparatus to produce sequences of sounds in some way similar to those that make up the speech chain. In retracing this long history, I will focus on some examples of the first and second paths. The first, beginning with the oracles of the Chaldean priests and the oracle of Orpheus in the Lesbos island, will lead us to examine the Android built by Albertus Magnus in the 13th century. Its functioning will be explained many years later, in the 17th century, by a German Jesuit priest and ...
Spostamenti vocalici tra parlato letto e parlato spontaneo in lingue a sette vocali
Interspeech 2017, 2017
Previous studies on Italian speech showed that the percentage of vocalic portion in the utterance... more Previous studies on Italian speech showed that the percentage of vocalic portion in the utterance (%V) and the duration of the interval between two consecutive vowel onset points (VtoV) were larger for parkinsonian (PD) than for healthy controls (HC). Especially, the values of %V were distinctly separated between PD and HC. The present study aimed to further test the finding on Mandarin and Polish. Twenty-five Mandarin speakers (13 PD and 12 HC matched on age) and thirty-one Polish speakers (18 PD and 13 HC matched on age) read aloud a passage of story. The recorded speeches were segmented into vocalic and consonantal intervals, and then %V and VtoV were calculated. For both languages, VtoV overlapped between HC and PD. For Polish, %V was distinctly higher in PD than in HC, while for Mandarin there was no significant difference. It suggests that %V could be used for automatic diagnosis of PD for Italian and Polish, but not for Mandarin. The effectiveness of the rhythmic metric appears to be language-dependent, varying with the rhythmic typology of the language.
I due volumi raccolgono i contributi presentati al Congresso Internazionale―La Comunicazione Parl... more I due volumi raccolgono i contributi presentati al Congresso Internazionale―La Comunicazione Parlata‖, tenutosi a Napoli dal 23 al 25 febbraio 2009 ed organizzato dal GSCP (Gruppo di Studio sulla Comunicazione Parlata della Società di Linguistica Italiana ...
The Speaker's Age: A Perceptual Study
The results of this experimental research on Italian language show that it is possible to infer a... more The results of this experimental research on Italian language show that it is possible to infer a speaker's age on a perceptual basis with good approximation. The procedure involves a series of comparative tests where the unknown voice is compared to ...
SpeechProsody
Parkinson's Disease dysarthria affects the speech motor control, causing alterations at the supra... more Parkinson's Disease dysarthria affects the speech motor control, causing alterations at the suprasegmental level of speech. In previous researches, vowel percentage (%V) and the mean interval between two consecutive vowel onset points (VtoV) were effectively used in the synchronic description of the rhythmic variations of Italian PD speech, compared to healthy speech, even at a very early stage of the disease. This study aims at verifying the early alteration of PD speech rhythm using a diachronic approach. To reach this goal, a corpus of read speech produced by a single PD subject (female, 66 years old) has been collected, consisting of 15 radiophonic speech samples (about 100 s each) on the same topic, recorded between 2001 and 2021. The speech samples were manually segmented in consonantal and vocalic intervals by means of Praat, allowing the calculation of %V and VtoV. The results show an alteration of %V values since 2018, two years before the diagnosis and the insurgence of motor symptoms. Moreover, first results of the application of the automatic segmentation performed by SPPAS on a selection of PD speech samples will also be presented.
Il Parlato Italiano. Atti del Convegno Nazionale, Napoli 13-15 febbraio 2003
D'Auria Editore, 2004
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Papers by Massimo Pettorino