zihan w.

I am a second-year PhD student in speech science at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. More precisely, my area of expertise is speech production, particularly in the source-filter theory, voice source modelling and voice quality.

I consider myself a mix of engineer and linguist. After graduating with a BEng in Information Engineering at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China, I pursued my MPhil degree in Speech and Language Processing at Trinity College Dublin, where I was awarded the degree with Distinction.

My MPhil dissertation was in the area of speech science, or more specifically, on voice source (or the glottal flow). I investigated the role of glottal flow residual in affect-related voice transformation, particularly in terms of naturalness and the expressiveness of effect, and then presented a method for modeling the residual.

After completing my MPhil degree, I worked as a research assistant at the Phonetics and Speech Lab, TCD. During my RA time, I adapted my MPhil dissertation into a conference paper, which later got published and presented in Interspeech, the major conference in the area of speech science. I also mentored an MPhil student's dissertation on the topic of inverse filtering in the source-filter theory of speech production.

In my first year of PhD, I published and presented in two conference papers, in ICPhS (the major conference in phonetic science) and Interspeech respectively. I also gave a talk at the Linguistic Research Seminar of TCD where I talked about the physiology of speech production and the problem of aliasing distortion in voice source modelling.