32.3330, Featured Linguist: Scott Moisik

Sat Oct 23 02:35:08 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3330. Fri Oct 22 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3330, Featured Linguist: Scott Moisik

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Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 22:34:48
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Scott Moisik

Linguistics through art and music: My story on how I came to do what I do

I have always been an artsy individual, so it seemed only natural that I
should pick fine arts as my undergraduate major. Frankly, high school did not
leave me feeling very confident that I would be able to study much of anything
else. Pursuing fine arts allowed me to develop an appreciation for how the
visual arts use modeling as a lens through which we can better understand
nature in all of its beautiful (and horrendous) complexity. But while fine
arts was a comfortable choice, I was not fulfilled and started exploring other
areas of study, and I eventually discovered linguistics.

Initially I decided to take a linguistics course under the misguided belief
that it might somehow help me with my communication skills. However, I soon
developed a fascination with the bits and pieces of language, the wonderful
strangeness of phenomena like implicature, and the machinations underlying
speech production – the “meat” of our vocal tract. My interest in the study of
the process of speaking became intertwined with my interest in music that
features various “abuses” of the human voice (Skinny Puppy, Swans,
Einstürzende Neubauten… that sort of stuff). I was ultimately drawn into an
academic descent into the lower vocal tract.

My descent began innocently enough. Towards the end of my undergraduate
studies in linguistics, my phonetics professor, the late (but very great)
Michael Dobrovolsky handed me a dusty VHS tape entitled “Pharyngeal
Articulations”. On the video was a laryngoscopic view of John Esling’s throat
as he performed a series of laryngeal manipulations, including lowered and
raised larynx voice qualities and, most importantly, growling. These
vocalizations absolutely resonated with my musical interests and I was utterly
captivated. I sought out John Esling and pursued graduate studies under his
supervision. This would ultimately lead to many laryngeal adventures with
John, including the production of a book which gave me a chance to express my
love of the larynx artistically – by drawing the states of the larynx (see
Figure 1). However, it was during my graduate studies that I discovered an
entirely new means to tap into my artistic need to create models: I had the
opportunity to create a 3D computer model of the larynx.

Please visit this article on the LINGUIST List Blog to see Figure 1!
https://blog.linguistlist.org/fund-drive/featured-linguist-scott-moisik/
Figure 1: My hand-drawn illustrations of the laryngeal constriction continuum
from fully unconstricted (left), as in ‘deep inspiration’, to fully
constricted (right), as in epiglottal stop [ʡ]. These illustrations appear in
Voice Quality: The Laryngeal Articulator Model, a book I co-authored with John
Esling, Allison Benner, and Lise Crevier-Buchman. It also happened to win the
LSA’s 2021 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award.

Given my background in art, the opportunity to develop an interactive
articulatory model of the larynx seemed like the ultimate chance to marry my
interests together. The only problem was my general lack of any formal
training in the necessary technical fields. However, I was not deterred, and I
soon learned what was needed to build my model (with no small amount of help
from the online courses offered by Stanford University and MIT and some very
patient engineering friends of mine). While topics like math, physics, and
computer programming had previously seemed out of reach for me, having a clear
purpose suddenly made them fresh and exciting. They started to reveal their
secrets and surprising interconnections. I began to view them as a new sort of
paint brush through which new dynamic forms of representation and
understanding became possible.

As it would turn out, the computational skills and appreciation for math and
science that I developed during my years as a graduate student have allowed me
to pursue a career as a linguist. I have had the humbling opportunity to
explore many issues within phonetics and phonology by applying computational
modeling (for example, see, Figure 2), and I know that this will continue to
be the way forward to help us tackle questions that would be difficult or
impossible to address otherwise.

Please visit this article on the LINGUIST List Blog to see Figure 2!
https://blog.linguistlist.org/fund-drive/featured-linguist-scott-moisik/
Figure 2: Video of the pressure distribution from 0 to 10 kHz for the vocal
tract airway in the shape of an [u] computed using the Boundary Element –
Rayleigh Integral Method (BERIM). As a fine arts student, I could not possibly
have imagined that one day I would be tinkering with Fortran code to simulate
3D vocal tract acoustics.

I now also find myself honored to be in the position to teach phonetics to new
generations of students, and modeling is a key part of my teaching. Physical
models are helpful for teaching about anatomy and physiology of speech and
hearing. In my own course, I take it to the next level by transforming my
lessons into hands-on artistic experiences with anatomy. Each lesson, students
build models of speech structures in class using modeling clay (see Figure 3).

Please visit this article on the LINGUIST List Blog to see Figure 3!
https://blog.linguistlist.org/fund-drive/featured-linguist-scott-moisik/
Figure 3: Hands busy at work getting to know the structures of the vocal tract
through sculpture in my course on anatomy and physiology of speech called “The
Meat of Speech” that I teach at NTU in Singapore.

We have a lot of fun, but it also never ceases to amaze me how such a simple
act of using modeling clay to “unproject” 2D representations of body
structures into physical 3D structures reveals insights about form and
function and produces that ‘a ha!’ moment in my students. I apply a similar
hands-on approach in my other more technical courses, where we “digitally
sculpt” the sound of the human voice. I know what it’s like to feel as though
these more technical topics are “out of reach”, but I have the egalitarian
belief that everyone can be empowered by becoming acquainted with them. In
this way my occasionally STEM-shy humanities students begin to see the beauty
in math, physics, and computer programming and how the marriage of disciplines
provides powerful models that can help us gain new insight into speech and
language.

Scott Moisik

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