Wichita State University
Marantz PMD670 sharpens speech pathology
capabilities at Wichita State University
When people talk, Tony DiLollo listens very carefully.
DiLollo, an assistant professor of speech-language pathology in the
Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences at Wichita
State University, does qualitative research that requires meticulous
attention to and reproduction of people’s speech.
Attention is no problem. It’s the reproduction that has caused
headaches for DiLollo.
Wichita State University professor Tony DiLollo
“When you go out with a little portable tape recorder to
record interviews, you get a lot of background noise and
sections of the tape are difficult to understand,” he says.
“There’s not much you can do about it except rewind and
play it again, and again, and again. People have used DAT
tapes and recorders, but those are very expensive and not
many people have access to them.”
The solution for DiLollo and his department is the Marantz
PMD670, a state-of-the-art audio recorder that stores extremely
high-quality recordings on compact flash cards similar to those in
digital cameras.
“Generally, I’m looking for specific things subjects say,” DiLollo
says. “I look for common themes that I extract from their narra-
tives, and the easier it is to transcribe, the more reliable the
themes are – I know I’m using what they actually said.”
introduces his students to the PMD670.
The PMD670’s portability means the 10 doctoral and
eight clinical faculty members at Wichita State can
record clients in any setting, from home to hospital to
nursing home, when the clients can’t get to the
campus lab.
“The PMD670 allows me to record an interview, download it to the
computer and listen as I transcribe,” DiLollo says. “I work with
people who stutter, and if a section is hard to understand, it’s very
easy to play it over and over.”
For permanent storage, the files can be burned to compact
disks in tracks that can be labeled for easy retrieval of only
the data needed for a particular report.
“Clinicians are always recording clients’ speech to
analyze use of language, but they also record
responses to do voice or acoustic analysis,” says
DiLollo. “With this unit they’ll be able to collect samples
digitally anywhere and then open them in an
analysis program.”
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In acoustic analysis, speech-language pathologists study
speech in terms of the different frequencies that make up
speech signals. It’s an important tool, because it allows the
pathologists to pinpoint therapies.
“Each sound is uniquely constructed with frequencies,” DiLollo says.
“If someone isn’t sounding right, acoustic analysis allows us to
identify what to work on.”
That means that frequency responses in the recording device the
clinicians use must be broad enough to accurately depict every
sound – a requirement other digital recorders didn’t meet.
“I looked at some other digital recorders, but they just
didn’t have the frequency response that was important for
me,” says DiLollo. “Not only that, the quality of those
recordings was no better – and in some cases worse – than
cassette tapes.”
He adds that the PMD670 produces hi-fidelity recordings that
rival DAT tapes for clarity. “The quality of the recordings is much
better than anything else I’ve found on the market,” he says.
The quality is so impressive that the university purchased two units –
one for the doctoral faculty to use in research and one for the clinical
faculty to use in clinical applications. At present, the faculty is using
the devices largely to record people speaking, but DiLollo anticipates
many more applications as the staff becomes more familiar with
the equipment’s capabilities.
“I’m sure we’ll do voice analysis, and we may like to move
into using the PMD670 to demonstrate progress over time,”
he says. “We do a lot of report writing for Medicare and
third-party reimbursement, and this would be a very
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powerful way to demonstrate progress. We could record short
and the higher-frequency components were clearly audible.
As a result, the student was able to record the necessary
stimuli, download it to a laptop and administer the tests she
needed for her work in child language and literacy.
“This student now has exposure to this research technology, and
she’s seeing the clinical applications,” DiLollo says. “When
students understand the technology and its applications,
samples and responses and save different files that
represent progress over time.”
DiLollo is already introducing the next generation of
speech-language pathologists to benefits of
technology such as the PMD670. When a doctoral
student needed specific high-frequency components
of some sounds to use in her dissertation project, for
example, he suggested the PMD670. The PMD670
produced high-quality recordings with very little noise,
they can make good arguments for adopting it when they
get into their own workplaces. I’m sure there are
hun dre ds of additional applications that I haven’t even
thought of yet.”
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