Plenary Sessions

We are very excited to announce our two distinguished plenary speakers: Dennis Jones and Michael Kiefte.

Dennis F. Jones graduated from Dalhousie University with an M.Sc. in physics in 1985. For the past twenty years he has been working as a sonar transducer designer at DRDC Atlantic in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He was elected Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 2000 for contributions in his field of engineering acoustics, and has recently been elected Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on Engineering Acoustics. As a naturalist, Dennis has applied his acoustical skills to the study of animal sounds, tree vibrations, even the winds of Hurricane Juan in September 2003. One of his more memorable moments was playing whale songs to 'Sluice', a juvenile humpback whale that swam through the tidal gates of the Annapolis Tidal Generating Station in August 2004.

Hermit Thrush Photo by Dennis F. Jones, 2003

Ethereal and reverberant, the song of the Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) is one of the most beautiful in North America. Dennis will talk about a systematic analysis of many songs from birds in and around Halifax, Nova Scotia, that has revealed underlying complexities and subtleties that may allow individuals to be identified by sound alone.

Michael Kiefte completed a doctorate in Experimental Phonetics at the University of Alberta and then went on to post-doctoral work in auditory physiology and psychoacoustics at the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently at Dalhousie University where he continues research in speech perception and production, stuttering, and hearing.

Michael will provide an overview of recent advances in speech production and perception research at Dalhousie University from basic auditory processes in vowel perception to problems in dialectal variation in Nova Scotia.