Thursday, January 24, 2013

New fieldwork tool! iSLR Field Recorder

The Sociolinguistics Research Lab at the University of Victoria has just released a really nifty tool for fieldwork, especially sociophonetic fieldwork. It's an app for iPhone, iPad or iPod that …
allows you to record words or phrases prompted by your own text list (optionally randomized). Then, simply upload your recording session to your Dropbox account or Sync with iTunes. You can retrieve new wordlists from Dropbox, too!  
I saw a demo of an early version last year at NWAV by Alex D'Arcy (she developed it) and it was pretty slick then. I haven't tried it out yet, but can't wait.

Now, if they can develop an app that will get IRB approval for new projects, the future will be without limit.

3 comments:

MGN said...

Won't the audio quality suck?

Joe said...

With the demo, I remember being pleasantly surprised on that count. Not sound booth and good mic, but reasonable for many purposes.

Anonymous said...

The audio quality of any recording app depends a lot on the microphone used and the recording environment. You can purchase some pretty nice 3rd party mics for iDevices and try to record in a quiet, insulated (and isolated) room. The recordings are saved as RAW (.wav) files at 44.1Khz and 16-bit.

Cheers,
Chris Coey