Volunteers were brought into Professor Hanson’s laboratory and asked to, first listen to each model without answering. Then each model was played again for them, pausing in between each one to record the volunteer’s identification of the sound they just heard. The results are recorded below. More testing will need to be done for a more complete sense of how people hear each model’s sound.

In future iterations of these tests, the location will hopefully be changed to a quieter environment such as the Phasor Laboratory in the Wold Center. I will also need to experiment with the best way to play the models for the volunteers. It seemed at times as if the succession of models was confusing. Knowing that each model played a different sound and there were only five vowel sound being modeled, sometimes the volunteers would second-guess their previous answers based on the model being played at the time. It may be more effective to not disclose which phonemes are the focus of the project and let volunteers come up with their own word to describe or exemplify the sound. Additionally, it will be interesting to test students of different majors, including non-engineers and music students. Testing adults (individuals older than 30) to see if they hear the models more or less clearly than the college students. Children could also be tested but those tests may prove impractical logistically over the next two months.