He moved to Germany in his early years and was mainly educated at the University of Kiel by the German phonetician Klaus J. Kohler.
His principal research areas were speech synthesis, rhythm and segmental structures, the application of linguistics to questions of pronunciation learning, speech-language pathology and speech technology in general.
Barry's innovative and productive research and his close co-operation with the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University as well as with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (also Saarbruecken) made the Saarbruecken Institute of Phonetics an outstanding pillar of science in Europe.
In 2007, Barry held the chair at the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS).
a council member of the International Phonetic Association[2] and editor of PHONUS journal.