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, where I’m working on a variety of topics, including microprosodic cues to obstruent voicing contrasts, microprosodic cues to laryngeal coda consonants, the articulatory dynamics of Danish consonants, and the development of software tools for processing and visualizing acoustic data.
Most of my work (including my dissertation) has dealt with the stop consonants of Danish. Colleagues and I have investigated intervocalic voicing and spectral characteristics of stop releases, and used a large legacy corpus of dialect recordings to investigate regional variation in voice onset time, closure voicing, and characteristics of stop releases. We have also proposed a new phonological analysis of the infamous Danish stop-semivowel alternations, suggesting that they are better understood as the outcome of sound change rather than synchronically active phonology.
I have also published on information structure from an interactional linguistics perspective, forensic phonetics, second language acquisition, and morphological change.
News
I’ll be heading to Speech Prosody in Leiden in July, where I’m coauthoring two papers – one on sustained stylized pitch in narrative speech in native Australian languages with Kathleen Jepson and John Mansfield, and one on coda pitch perturbations in Eastern Khmu’ with James Kirby, Francesco Burroni, and Sireemas Maspong. I’m also hosting a special session on segmental influences on prosody with my colleague Menghui Shi. Hope to see you there!
My R package
praatpictureis now on CRAN and can be installed in R with the usualinstall.packages('praatpicture')command! This package uses base R functionality to make flexible plots and animations of speech audio, derived signals, and annotations. The package comes with extensive documentation and theREADMEfile provides example code and plots for most of the functionality. The freshest updates will still be available on GitHub before on CRAN, but I’m hoping that this can help spread the word further.I just got a back from a great week in Stockholm, where I first went to Phonology in the Nordic Countries where I presented me and Francesco Burroni‘s ongoing work on articulation of the Danish so-called ’soft d’. Slides can be found here. I also co-presented a poster with Maryann Tan on voicing rates and consonant-intrinsic F0 in Central Standard Swedish. Afterwards I stuck around the Multilingualism Lab and hung around with the great folks there for a few very productive days of working on said study about Central Standard Swedish. Thanks for having me!
I’m headed to to the 13th International Seminar on Speech Production in Autrans in May to further spread the word about
praatpicture, my R package for plotting acoustic data with time-aligned annotations. You can find an abstract here. Hope to see you there!I had a great trip to the UK in spite of a disastrous beginning to the journey (which was Lufthansa’s fault, not the UK’s!). Saw some very interesting talks at the Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology, and Henrik and I had some great conversations about our poster. I had a wonderful trip to Lancaster afterwards, spending a few days with the extremely hospitable people from the Phonetics Lab. I presented some of my work on phonetics–phonology interfacing in Jutland Danish stop gradation (slides are here), and gave a demo of my R package
praatpicture.