About
The Cornell Phonetics Lab is a group of students and faculty who are curious about speech. We study patterns in speech — in both movement and sound. We do a variety research — experiments, fieldwork, and corpus studies. We test theories and build models of the mechanisms that create patterns. Learn more about our Research. See below for information on our events and our facilities.
Upcoming Events
6th May 2026 10:00 AM
Phonetics Lab Meeting - Lecture by Dr. Jiahong Yuan on Tone Recognition
Phonetics Lab alumnus Dr. Jiahong Yuan (PhD 2004) will give a talk titled: From Speech Analysis to Model-Brain Alignment: The Case of Tone Recognition
Abstract:
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence in recent years has created new opportunities for research at the intersection of linguistics, neuroscience, and AI. Taking speech recognition as an example, the application of Transformer models and the pre-training-fine-tuning approach has significantly improved recognition accuracy, including recognizing tones in connected speech.Building on my research on tone recognition, this talk introduces a novel method for speech analysis that leverages model representations, and presents three studies related to model-brain alignment: learning mechanisms, speaker normalization, and neural decoding of tones.
Bio:
Dr. Jiahong Yuan is a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cornell University in 2004. Before joining USTC, He held positions in the Department of Linguistics and the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, Liulishuo Silicon Valley AI Lab, and Baidu Research Institute.
His main research areas include phonetics and the integration of linguistics and artificial intelligence. He has led multiple research projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the National Social Science Fund of China, among others.His current research focuses on the early detection and prediction of Alzheimer’s disease through spoken language, investigating the origin and evolution of Chinese tones with machine learning methods, and exploring model-brain alignment from the perspective of tone recognition.
Location: Room B11, Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA/index.png)
5th June 2026 10:00 AM
Voiceprints and Voice Disguises
Every person has a unique voice.
In this presentation, Professor Sam Tilsen (Director of the Cornell Phonetics Lab) and Ph.D. Student Annabelle di Lustro will talk about the various acoustic characteristics of speech that allow individuals to be identified solely from their voices.
They will also discuss recent work on vocal identity in whispered speech, with interactive demos and time for Q&A.
Location: Room 106, Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
Facilities
The Cornell Phonetics Laboratory (CPL) provides an integrated environment for the experimental study of speech and language, including its production, perception, and acquisition.
Located in Morrill Hall, the laboratory consists of six adjacent rooms and covers about 1,600 square feet. Its facilities include a variety of hardware and software for analyzing and editing speech, for running experiments, for synthesizing speech, and for developing and testing phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguistic models.
Web-Based Phonetics and Phonology Experiments with LabVanced
The Phonetics Lab licenses the LabVanced software for designing and conducting web-based experiments.
Labvanced has particular value for phonetics and phonology experiments because of its:
- *Flexible audio/video recording capabilities and online eye-tracking.
- *Presentation of any kind of stimuli, including audio and video
- *Highly accurate response time measurement
- *Researchers can interactively build experiments with LabVanced's graphical task builder, without having to write any code.
Students and Faculty are currently using LabVanced to design web experiments involving eye-tracking, audio recording, and perception studies.
Subjects are recruited via several online systems:
- * Prolific and Amazon Mechanical Turk - subjects for web-based experiments.
- * Sona Systems - Cornell subjects for for LabVanced experiments conducted in the Phonetics Lab's Sound Booth
Computing Resources
The Phonetics Lab maintains two Linux servers that are located in the Rhodes Hall server farm:
- Lingual - This Ubuntu Linux web server hosts the Phonetics Lab Drupal websites, along with a number of event and faculty/grad student HTML/CSS websites.
- Uvular - This Ubuntu Linux dual-processor, 24-core, two GPU server is the computational workhorse for the Phonetics lab, and is primarily used for deep-learning projects.
In addition to the Phonetics Lab servers, students can request access to additional computing resources of the Computational Linguistics lab:
- *Badjak - a Linux GPU-based compute server with eight NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti GPUs
- *Compute server #2 - a Linux GPU-based compute server with eight NVIDIA A5000 GPUs
- *Oelek - a Linux NFS storage server that supports Badjak.
These servers, in turn, are nodes in the G2 Computing Cluster, which currently consists of 195 servers (82 CPU-only servers and 113 GPU servers) consisting of ~7400 CPU cores and 698 GPUs.
The G2 Cluster uses the SLURM Workload Manager for submitting batch jobs that can run on any available server or GPU on any cluster node.
Articulate Instruments - Micro Speech Research Ultrasound System
We use this Articulate Instruments Micro Speech Research Ultrasound System to investigate how fine-grained variation in speech articulation connects to phonological structure.
The ultrasound system is portable and non-invasive, making it ideal for collecting articulatory data in the field.
BIOPAC MP-160 System
The Sound Booth Laboratory has a BIOPAC MP-160 system for physiological data collection. This system supports two BIOPAC Respiratory Effort Transducers and their associated interface modules.
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Language Corpora
- The Cornell Linguistics Department has more than 915 language corpora from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), consisting of high-quality text, audio, and video corpora in more than 60 languages. In addition, we receive three to four new language corpora per month under an LDC license maintained by the Cornell Library.
- This Linguistic Department web page lists all our holdings, as well as our licensed non-LDC corpora.
- These and other corpora are available to Cornell students, staff, faculty, post-docs, and visiting scholars for research in the broad area of "natural language processing", which of course includes all ongoing Phonetics Lab research activities.
- This Confluence wiki page - only available to Cornell faculty & students - outlines the corpora access procedures for faculty supervised research.
Speech Aerodynamics
Studies of the aerodynamics of speech production are conducted with our Glottal Enterprises oral and nasal airflow and pressure transducers.
Electroglottography
We use a Glottal Enterprises EG-2 electroglottograph for noninvasive measurement of vocal fold vibration.
Real-time vocal tract MRI
Our lab is part of the Cornell Speech Imaging Group (SIG), a cross-disciplinary team of researchers using real-time magnetic resonance imaging to study the dynamics of speech articulation.
Articulatory movement tracking
We use the Northern Digital Inc. Wave motion-capture system to study speech articulatory patterns and motor control.
Sound Booth
Our isolated sound recording booth serves a range of purposes--from basic recording to perceptual, psycholinguistic, and ultrasonic experimentation.
We also have the necessary software and audio interfaces to perform low latency real-time auditory feedback experiments via MATLAB and Audapter.
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