Reconstructing Ancient Sounds Using FDA

• Activity Number: 328
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: IMS
• Author(s): John Aston* and John Coleman and Davide Pigoli and Nathaniel Shiers and Jim Smith
• Companies: University of Cambridge and University of Oxford and University of Cambridge and University of Warwick and University of Warwick
• Keywords: Functional Data Analysis ; Covariance Analysis ; Separable Structures ; Object Data Analysis ; Phonetics

Abstract

Functional data comes in many forms, but one somewhat more unusual type is acoustic data. Acoustic data can be naturally represented as 2-D spectrograms, which are essentially 2-D functions. In this presentation, we will examine whether FDA and more generally object data analysis can be used to reconstruct historical sounds from present day recordings represented as spectrograms. This will be done by building suitable geodesics between languages, and then reconstructing possible acoustic signals based on the associated spectrograms. We will also examine whether phylogenetic trees are a suitable structure for incorporating multiple languages into such a reconstruction process. It will be shown (heard) that is it possible to reconstruct versions of historical languages from present day languages resulting in a form of sonic time travel.