Assessing the validity of remote recordings captured with a generic smartphone application designed for speech research

Joshua Penney, Ben Davies, Felicity Cox

Friday, December 16th, 2022, 3.15pm – 3.45pm

Abstract

This paper introduces a generic smartphone application designed for collecting speech data remotely: Appen Research. Data collected from 24 female Australian English-speaking participants using the smartphone application were compared to data collected from the same participants with laboratory-based equipment. F1 and F2 values were extracted from the midpoints of the 11 stressed monophthongs of Australian English. While some non-low vowels showed slight raising of F1 values in the data recorded with the application, overall the results suggest that recordings collected with the smartphone application are generally comparable to recordings made in a studio for the purposes of analysing vowel formants.