(ELECTRONIC MUSIC)
Hello. My name is Carme Mangiron. I am from Universitat Autònoma.
I have curly, brown hair, brown eyes,
and I am wearing a black blouse with white flowers and red petals.
I am standing in front of a while wall in my Barcelona apartment.
Together with Anna Matamala, I am one of the leaders of
the Researching Audio Description Project.
It is an interdisciplinary project that lasts three years
and is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science,
Innovation and Universities.
The objective of the project
is to bring forward the research on audio description
by focusing on four underexplored areas.
The first one is the delivery of AD, and specially focusing on prosody.
The second one is about AD translation,
and we'll be looking at less-studied languages,
such as Spanish and Chinese.
Then we have two case studies.
The first case study is video games,
and we are going to be looking at how AD could improve game accessibility
for blind and low vision players.
We'll talk with players,
and try to find out what their needs, expectations and preferences are.
Finally,
the second case scenario is about opera AD,
and again, we'll talk to users
to find out their needs and preferences.
We hope that the Researching Audio Description Project
will contribute to improving accessibility
for blind and low vision users.
Thank you.
Good morning. I am María Machuca,
I have brown hair and I am wearing glasses
and at this moment I am at home in my office.
I am responsible of the prosody part
in the Researching Audio Description Project,
whose coordinators are
Carme Mangiron and Anna Matamala
and I want to show you how we annotate the audio signal
and how we extract the acoustic parameters.
The films were transcribed with ELAN.
ELAN is an annotation tool for video and audio recordings.
Then when the recordings are annotated
we extract the transcriptions and we open at the same time
the signal and the transcription in Praat software.
This is the Praat software.
It allows us to divide audio description units
in intonation groups.
Here you are a sample.
At the bottom, you can observe
how the audio description units can be divided
into different intonation groups.
We can label the prosodic features that separate the prosodic boundary,
for example, pitch, in this case,
or pause, in this case.
The blue line indicates the evolution of the speaker's pitch
when he pronounces this audio description unit.
Here the prosodic boundary is the pitch,
so we label it as pitch.
In this group of intonation,
the pitch also drops and then rises,
so we label it as pitch too,
but here, in this other group,
there is nothing,
the speaker has realized a pause,
here it’s a pause, so we label it as a pause.
When we have finished this process,
we know the prosodic features that divide
the intonation groups for the speaker
and, also, what duration,
pitch and intensity values
we have for each intonation group.
In this way,
we describe the voice of this speaker.