I am a Dornsife Fellow in General Education at the University of Southern California. I received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California in 2022. My research examines speech production through the lens of vocal music behaviors like singing, beatboxing, and beatrhyming.
I am a member of the USC Phonetics and Phonology group and the Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge (SPAN) group (SPAN) group which collected the real-time MRI beatboxing videos I used in my dissertation.
I pronounce my name as [ɹiːd blɛ͡ilak] and use he/him pronouns.
Beatrhyming is the art of simultaneous performance of speech and beatboxing by a single person. This open access publication is the first in-depth scientific analysis of how an expert beatrhymer weaves beatboxing sounds into words.
Highly skilled beatboxers manipulate vocal airflow in a myriad of ways. So if you want to be a better beatboxer, you need to know how to move your air! This article was jointly written by a beatboxer and beatbox scientist to teach beatboxers about the role of airstream mechanisms in beatboxing.
Beatboxing sounds like the Kick Drum use lip closing actions that are qualitatively similar to lip closures in speech, like for [b] and [p]. We measured how long the lips take to get up to top speed for one beatboxer's bilabial Kick Drum closures, and our results are similar to previous reports for similar speech movements.
Beatboxing is a percussive style of vocal music that began with the birth of hip hop. Comparing beatboxing to speech helps us understand why speech uses relatively few of the possible sounds the mouth can make.
Singers need fine-tuned precision to find the right note or sound quality. Measuring how singers adapt speech sounds to music reveals more about the flexibility of the fundamental action units of speech.
Beatrhyming is the simultaneous performance of speech (singing, rapping, etc.) and beatboxing by an individual. Beatrhyming shows how speech can collaborate with other vocal behaviors.
I developed a MatLab user interface to expedite timing analyses of real-time MRI videos like the ones collected by the USC Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge group.
I use evidence-based practices in my teaching and write about the results in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
An articulatory and acoustic phonetics class taught through the lens of vocal (and non-vocal) music. Each unit highlights a different vocal music style: opera, heavy metal, overtone singing, and beatboxing.
An introduction to speech synthesis and recognition technology and the algorithms at their core, from mass-spring systems to neural networks.
An upper-division course about how the vocal tract produces sound, with an emphasis on less commonly taught articulations and vocal behaviors.
As a member of the Linguistics Society of America's Faculty Learning Community, I've helped build web resources and organized conference sessions about promoting justice-anchored scholarship of teaching and learning in Linguistics.