we are hiring a PhD candidate to work on clinical voice quality
characterisation at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria.
This project has a strong focus on auditory aspects of voice
quality. We would appreciate if you could forward the following
announcement to prospective applicants.
The Medical University of Vienna (MUV), Austria, seeks to fill
a position of a PhD candidate 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), and SQL.
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 should be submitted to philipp.aichinger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Information regarding the living in Vienna, Austria, can be
found at https://www.meduniwien.ac.at/web/en/international-affairs/living-in-vienna/.