Dr Michael Newton's Homepage
Welcome to my academic webpage. This provides an overview of the research work I've been involved with over the past few years. For a list of publications/conferences click here.
Current work
As of March 2010 (until 2014) I am a Research Assistant at the University of Stirling's Department of Computing Science and Mathematics. My research work is focussed on the development of a MEMS/CMOS Multichannel Adaptive Microphone. Broadly speaking this work is in the category of "biologically-inspired technology". We hope to use research into the amazing success of the human hearing system to inform novel microphone technology.
This work is a collaborative project between the Institute for Integrated Micro and Nano Systems at the University of Edinburgh and the Department of Computing Science and Mathematics at Stirling.
A brief (legacy) summary of the project is provided here.
The new collaboration webpage is here.
Background/Previous work
From 2001 - 2004 I studied at the University of Edinburgh for a BSc in Physics. My honours year courses included acoustics, quantum physics, condensed matter physics and atmospheric physics. I also did 2 honours year projects in the fields of fluid mechanics and acoustics.
From 2004-2008 I worked in the Acoustics & Fluids
group at the School
of Physics, University of
Edinburgh, studying towards a PhD in Physics
(graduated in June 2009). The title of the PhD is "Experimental
Mechanical and Fluid Mechanical Investigations of the Brass
Instrument Lip-reed and the Human Vocal Folds". It can be
downloaded
by clicking here (beware that it is 325 pages long and a 7meg
file..download/read at your peril!). More relevant perhaps is the
abstract,
readable here. Put very briefly, the interesting (at least I
think so...) bits of the thesis are:
- A direct comparison between the function of human lips in brass
playing (the 'lip-reed') with
so-called 'artificial lips'. Here's an old
BBC article about these things. It turns out that our lab models
of the brass player - brass instrument system could do with some
serious refinement (more damping of the lips in particular). But the
overall function of the simple lab models is remarkably good.
The ubiquitous '2-mass models' used by many people to model things like the lip-reed and the human vocal folds were compared with empirical evidence from high-speed filming of the lips during playing (see also the Copely and Strong paper here, which was an inspiration for my work, and another recent paper). Evidence to explain the success of these models was described and explained. This work was published in JASA here. - Experimental flow studies of in vitro self-oscillating
models of the human vocal folds, coupled to static representations
of the ventricular bands. This work was interesting because the
ventricular bands (a second 'vocal chord like' constriction located
in the larynx just downstream from the vocal chords) are thought to be
important for certain kinds of speech and singing, and in voice
pathologies. We studied the fluid mechanics of this problem by
building fully-functioning lab models ('in vitro') of the
human speech system and using Particle Image Velocimetry to examine
the flow around the replica larynx.
This was an obscenely complex experimental setup frought with technical issues (many of them involving vacuum grease...), but after 2 years it did produce some very interesting results, which are soon to be published.
Throughout 2009 I worked part-time as a visiting researcher in the same group. My old webpage there is still visible, click here.
