we are looking for a PhD candidate to work on voice quality
characterisation at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria.
Please forward the following announcement to prospect
applicants.
The Medical University of Vienna (MUV), Austria, seeks to
fill a position of a PhD-student within the project 'Objective
differentiation of dysphonic voice quality types'. The
candidate must hold a master’s degree, preferably in (one of)
the fields of sound engineering, acoustical engineering, audio
signal processing, or similar. The work will be conducted at
the Division of Phoniatrics-Logopedics within the Department
of Otorhinolaryngology of the MUV.
The workgroup hosting the project is interested in the
assessment of voice parameters relevant to the medical
diagnosis and clinical care of voice disorders. A focus is
given to functional assessment of voice, especially to the
objective description of voice quality. The levels of
description include kinematics of voice production, voice
acoustics, and auditory perception of voice. Clinical studies
are conducted with a laryngeal high-speed camera that records
vocal fold vibration at 4000 frames per second. Microphone
signals of the voice are recorded in parallel. Vibratory
patterns of the vocal folds are analysed visually and
computationally via modelling. Trajectories of vocal fold
edges, spatial arrangements thereof, and glottal area
waveforms are analysed. Regarding acoustics, analysis of audio
recordings involves the implementation, testing, and training
of specialized synthesizers for pathological voices. On the
level of auditory perception, listening experiments are
conducted, especially experiments involving discrimination
tasks.
Mandatory skills of the candidate are MATLAB programming,
speech signal processing, psychoacoustics, good knowledge of
English, good communication skills, and excellent analytical
thinking. Optional skills of the candidate are knowledge of
German, experience in a health care profession, image and
video processing, Python, PureData, object-oriented
programming, software engineering, version control
(Subversion, Git, or similar), SQL, and XML.
The project duration is 4-5 years. The Austrian Science Fund
(FWF) budgets for doctoral candidates a gross salary of
2.112,40 Euro per month. Application documents can be
submitted to philipp.aichinger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
by October 31st, 2018. Interviews are planned for November
2018. The project is planned to start in December 2018.
Information regarding the beautiful city of Vienna can be
found at https://www.meduniwien.ac.at/web/en/international-affairs/living-in-vienna/.