Folk culture represents the social, ethnic, and traditional livelihood of people belonging to a certain tribe or community and is important in keeping their culture and tradition alive. The Mizo people are a Tibeto-Burmese ethnic group, native to the Indian state of Mizoram and neighboring regions of Northeast India. Mizo folk culture is an amalgamation of festivity, celebration, liveliness, kinship, brotherhood, and merriment, and above all, preserves the ethnicity of this tribal community that is fundamentally entrenched. Unfortunately, the Mizos are fast giving up their old customs and adopting the new mode of life that is greatly influenced by the western culture. This makes it all the more crucial to preserve the intangible cultural heritage of this ethnic tribe whose folk cultures are vanishing day by day. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt at preservation and classification of Mizo folk songs. The first part of this paper presents a literature survey on preservation, analysis, and classification of folk songs. The second part presents the methodology for preliminary classification of Mizo folk songs. Three categories of Mizo folk songs—Hunting chants (Hlado), Children’s songs (Pawnto hla), and Elderly songs (Pi pu zai)—are used in this study. A total of 29 acoustic features are used. A long short-term memory network using custom attention layer has been proposed for classification, whose results are compared with four supervised models (Support Vector Machines, K-Nearest Neighbor, Naive Baye’s, and Ensemble). Experimental results from the proposed model are promising, with an implication of scope for future research in acoustic analysis and classification of Mizo folk songs using recent unsupervised methods.

Despite many attempts, we do not yet know how to answer the question exhaustively and adequately: What is common Danish stød phonetically? Specifically, is there an underlying physiological constancy behind the considerable acoustic variability? And is there a common denominator to the different acoustic manifestations that might explain their perceptual equivalence? Systematic acoustic, physiological, and perceptual investigations of common Danish stød now span (a little more than) three quarters of a century. This is a review of that research, to determine what may be considered established phonetic facts about common Danish stød and the open questions that remain for future research.

This article examines regional and stylistic variation in the merger of front vowels /eː/ and /ɛː/ in Finland-Swedish. The study investigates the merger by comparing formant data from 141 speakers from four Swedish-speaking regions in Finland. Additionally, intraspeaker variation is explored by incorporating samples from three contextual styles. The results indicate cross-regional differences between Finland-Swedish dialects, with a more distinct variant of /ɛː/ being used on the monolingually Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, compared to other regions. However, the findings show that speakers from mainland Finland also demonstrate significantly different formant values for the vowels, particularly in formal speech styles. These results challenge the assumption of a complete /eː-ɛː/ merger in Finland-Swedish, instead pointing to a near-merger, whereby two sounds sound the same to speakers, despite them being differentiated in production. The findings also shed new light on stylistic variation in the variety.

We investigated production of lexical stress in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD), all monolingual Italian speakers. The mean age of the 16 autistic children was 5.73 years and the mean age of the 16 typically developing children was 4.65 years. Picture-naming targets were five trisyllabic words that began with a weak–strong pattern of lexical stress across the initial two syllables (WS: matita) and five trisyllabic words beginning with a strong–weak pattern (SW: gomito). Acoustic measures of the duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the first two vowels for correct word productions were used to calculate a normalised Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) for WS and SW words. Results of acoustic analyses indicated no statistically significant group differences in PVIs. Results should be interpreted in line with the exploratory nature of this study. We hope this study will encourage additional cross-linguistic studies of prosody in children's speech production.

In this exploratory study, we examined stress contrastivity within real word productions elicited via picture naming in 20 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 20 typical peers group-wise matched on age and vocabulary. Targets had a dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a strong–weak pattern (SW: ‘caterpillar’, ‘butterfly’) or a non-dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a weak–strong pattern (WS: ‘tomato’, ‘potato’). Children produced each target twice (n = 320 productions). Acoustic measures were made for the duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the first two vowels for each word production. For vowel duration and fundamental frequency, children with ASD and typical peers produced a similar magnitude of stress contrastivity for SW and WS words. However, there was a significant group difference in the way contrastivity in intensity was realised for WS words whereby children with ASD produced less stress contrastivity than typical peers. Bayesian analyses were in line with our interpretation of our frequentist analyses.

Accurate measurement of herbage intake rate is critical to advance knowledge of the ecology of grazing ruminants. This experiment tested the integration of behavioral and acoustic measurements of chewing and biting to estimate herbage dry matter intake (DMI) in dairy cows offered micro-swards of contrasting plant structure. Micro-swards constructed with plastic pots were offered to three lactating Holstein cows (608±24.9 kg of BW) in individual grazing sessions (n=48). Treatments were a factorial combination of two forage species (alfalfa and fescue) and two plant heights (tall=25±3.8 cm and short=12±1.9 cm) and were offered on a gradient of increasing herbage mass (10 to 30 pots) and number of bites (~10 to 40 bites). During each grazing session, sounds of biting and chewing were recorded with a wireless microphone placed on the cows’ foreheads and a digital video camera to allow synchronized audio and video recordings. Dry matter intake rate was higher in tall alfalfa than in the other three treatments (32±1.6 v. 19±1.2 g/min). A high proportion of jaw movements in every grazing session (23 to 36%) were compound jaw movements (chew-bites) that appeared to be a key component of chewing and biting efficiency and of the ability of cows to regulate intake rate. Dry matter intake was accurately predicted based on easily observable behavioral and acoustic variables. Chewing sound energy measured as energy flux density (EFD) was linearly related to DMI, with 74% of EFD variation explained by DMI. Total chewing EFD, number of chew-bites and plant height (tall v. short) were the most important predictors of DMI. The best model explained 91% of the variation in DMI with a coefficient of variation of 17%. Ingestive sounds integrate valuable information to remotely monitor feeding behavior and predict DMI in grazing cows.