thealk / msu_scifest

Resources used in the MSU Science Festival (2024)

MSU Science Fest Resources

Resources used in the MSU Science Festival (2024)

"See Your Speech!"

Open the Praat script (see_your_speech_2024.praat) in Praat and click Run >> Run. It will prompt you to record an utterance (don't forget to Stop and then Save to List). It will then generate an image of the waveform and spectrogram of the sound, save it as a .PDF, and open the PDF (we printed these out for kids to take home). We included a sentence list of fun utterances for kids to try saying that would show patterns we could point out on the spectrogram (e.g., diphthongs, sibilants).

MSU Science Fest Slides

These contain an overview of the basic components of speech and speech acoustics as well as information about how Parkinson's disease affects speech.

Parkinson's disease resources

See a list of some local Michigan Parkinson's disease resources at our lab website.

In addition to these, we had a demo of the children's book "My Nunna Has Parkinson's," written by local author Toni Talbot grounded in her experiences with Parkinson's disease. Buy the book here.