Rasmus
Puggaard-Rode
Hi! I’m Rasmus Puggaard-Rode, roughly pronunced [ˈʁɑsmus ˌpʰukːɒːˀˈʁoːɤ]. I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Spoken Language Processing group led by James Kirby at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University.
My work combines corpus and experimental methods to untangle the many different ways categorical differences between speech sounds (especially consonants) can be realized phonetically, and what this means for the structure of language. This work involves working with both well-described Nordic languages and under-resourced languages of south-east Asia and Australia. I also work on developing general-purpose tools and pipelines for processing, analyzing, and visualizing speech data.
I hold a PhD in phonology and phonetics from Leiden University. My dissertation deals the class of consonant sounds in Danish known as stops: how they are phonetically realized, how they are structured in the grammar of the language, and how they vary among speakers of different dialects.
News
I was just at the (very hot) sixth Phonetics and Phonology in Europe conference in Palma, where I presented co-authored work with James Kirby and Nicolai Pharao on the interaction between co-intrinsic F0 caused by the laryngeal contrast in stops and other prosodic demands on pitch level in Danish. You can find the poster here.
Some major job news: as of September 2025, I will be Associate Professor of Phonetics at the University of Oxford, joining the vibrant Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics and the Phonetics Lab. I will also be an Official Fellow of Kellogg College. Phonetics is a very old discipline at Oxford, so these are big shoes to fill, and I’m very excited by this opportunity!
Michaela Watkins, Paul Boersma, Silke Hamann, and I have had a collaborative paper accepted at Interspeech on using F0 ratio as a diagnostic for the presence of creaky voice using data from Seoul Korean and Modern Standard Danish.
I’ve started developing an R library called
praatutilsfor calling the signal processing tools in Praat directly from R and getting results back in R-readable format. The project is in its early stages and feedback and contributions are very welcome!Our group in Munich hosted the third International Conference on Tone and Intonation in Herrsching. In addition to having great conversations and running around with a microphone during Q&A’s, I also presented a poster with Nicolai Pharao about what appears to be a specialized pitch accent used by some speakers of Danish for contrastive emphasis. Materials can be found here.