During the past two years, IHC researcher Quintino Lopes has been a scientific consultant and one of the contributors to the identification and inventory of the scientific collection of the Laboratory of Phonetics of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (FLUL) and to the creation of a Museum of Phonetics at that School.

“This is an important collection that belonged to the FLUL Phonetics Laboratory, directed by Professor Raquel Delgado Martins, which includes some instruments and documents from the Experimental Phonetics Laboratory of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the subject of my research in recent years”, Quintino Lopes tells us.

In an interview published on the FLUL website, Sónia Frota, scientific coordinator of the Museum and Director of the Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon (CLUL), stresses that “the visitor [of the Museum] will be able to find out more about instruments and methods that made possible the study of the sounds and gestures that we make and perceive when we communicate and see some of their scientific products. From the old kymograph, from the end of the 19th century / beginning of the 20th century, to the spectrograph, a central instrument in the study of acoustic phonetics between the 1940s and 1970s, the museum shows us how it was possible to make speech visible and analysable.”

The installation of the Museum was completed on the 6th of November, with the collaboration of a team of researchers from our center at the University of Évora, the National Museum of Natural History and Science and the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology and Baby Lab (CLUL – FLUL), coordinators of this initiative.