Yes, yes, I'm a terrible blogger...

... and I truly am sorry about that. I can't believe a month has gone by since my last post (but I do feel like this happens every time a new semester starts). Just WHAM! there goes a month.

It's been a great month, though. I'm very busy, as evidenced by the lack of blog updates, but in a good way. And in a different way from last year; last year I had so many classes I had to take. This semester, I'm taking fewer classes and starting to do some of my own research. I usually only have 2-4 hours of class a day, but the rest of the time I'm reading and tinkering.

I say "tinkering" because I do bits and pieces of things all day long and never really feel like I accomplish much. That's because one of my classes is "Field Methods", where we have a speaker of an under-studied language come in and we try to learn it over the course of a year. Once a week, I meet with our speaker for about an hour, record our session, and then later I have to go home and transcribe everything s/he said to figure out how the language works. This year, our language is a dialect of Quichua, which is spoken in the mountains of Ecuador. It has lots of 'sh' 'ch' 'k' and nasal sounds and everything seems like it's a lot more complicated to say than it has to be. Here are some phrases I've learned so far:

hello/how are you: imashna zhata kangi

I'm fine: alizha mikani

do you speak Quichua?: kang rimangi runa shimipi?

yes, I speak Quichua: ari, nyuka runa shimipi rimani

goodbye: ashta kashkama

So if you're ever lost in the mountains of Ecuador, there you go.

The other thing that's keeping me busy is this independent study project I'm working on. I mentioned it before, but to recap: I wound up with a bunch of recordings of black, white, and hispanic kids, and I'm trying to figure out what it is about their voices that lets people identify their race and gender. By "a bunch of recordings" I mean over 600 sound files, so right now I'm just going through them all and figuring out what exactly I have. The next step will be to play them to people and have them guess what race and gender the kids are. Then I'll have examples of the most and least prototypical voice types, and I'll be able to take measurements and see what it is that makes them easily identifiable (or not, as the case may be).

The reason I'm interested in looking at kids' voices is that it turns out that men's and women's voices are different in ways that aren't entirely predictable by their anatomy. The most noticeable thing about men's voices is obviously that they're lower, because men's larynxes descend during puberty (and their vocal cords thicken, among other things). But the really cool thing is that if you factor out the changes due to anatomy, there are still differences. So basically, men and women each have their own subtly different "dialect" of English.

Now if you look at kids before they hit puberty, their vocal tracts are all pretty much the same, as far as we know. So any differences between boys' and girls' voices before puberty are probably learned. I'm trying to figure out what exactly those differences are, and eventually I might tackle the question of how they're learned. (Dissertation...?)

Enough of that. In other news, I got a new computer!! It is so awesome. Here is a picture of it:

Yes, I made the leap and bought a brand new MacBook Pro. Yes, I am officially an academic now. But it's so pretty and fast and I looooooooove it. :)

Things are going great for Roger at work. They signed a big contract this week, so he actually has the weekend completely off. We're going out to celebrate my friend's birthday tonight, and we're going for a bikeride out in the country tomorrow. I can't wait! We were going to go today, but it's so hot (80 degrees here, 95+ on the other side of the hills), and my bike was making a funny noise, so we decided to postpone it until tomorrow.

I think that'll have to be all for now, friends. I'm going to do some reading before we head out tonight. I'll try to be better about updating!