Comparing acoustic analyses of speech data collected remotely

Abstract

Face-to-face speech data collection has been next to impossible globally as a result of the COVID-19 restrictions. To address this problem, simultaneous recordings of three repetitions of the cardinal vowels were made using a Zoom H6 Handy Recorder with an external microphone (henceforth, H6) and compared with two alternatives accessible to potential participants at home: the Zoom meeting application (henceforth, Zoom) and two lossless mobile phone applications (Awesome Voice Recorder, and Recorder; henceforth, Phone). F0 was tracked accurately by all of the devices; however, for formant analysis (F1, F2, F3), Phone performed better than Zoom, i.e., more similarly to H6, although the data extraction method (VoiceSauce, Praat) also resulted in differences. In addition, Zoom recordings exhibited unexpected drops in intensity. The results suggest that lossless format phone recordings present a viable option for at least some phonetic studies.