To get her data, she had to persuade a dozen residents of a settlement in Central Australia to participate in a procedure called palatography. She would carefully coat a participant's palate or tongue with an edible paint made of olive oil and digestive charcoal, have them say a word, and then do a videorecording of the resulting pattern. This would show where their tongue made contact with the roof of their mouth in creating each sound. She also took dental impressions of participant's mouths, so that the two-dimensional video recordings could be interpreted in three dimensions. In addition, she made audio recordings of the people and did listening tests to find out how they perceived different sounds.
People are such skilled hunters.
We'd be driving down the road, and one of the women would tell me to pull over. So we'd pull over, get the lizard, and we'd cook it and eat it right there. Although her experience in Silicon Valley was not as exotic, it also provides a possible career avenue. She did a set of recordings that provided the main female voice for a commercial speech synthesis product called Macin Talk. Last year Apple invited Victoria back to help create and record a database of American English for its new speech synthesis product, PlainTalk.