Will is out of town Friday

• His office hours will be canceled

• Class is canceled Friday! - Take the time to be kind to yourself.

What does speech sound like?

Will Styler - LIGN 6

Review - Visualizing Sound

“Noise” - Waveform

“Noise” - Spectral Slice (FFT)

“Noise” - Spectrogram

<audio controls src="phonmedia/noise.wav"></audio>

Today’s plan:

• What do vowels look like?

• What do consonants look like?

Fundamentals of Speech

Voicing

Spectrograms show us many evenly-spaced vertical lines

• These are individual glottal pulses

• Higher pitched voices will have…?

  • More tightly spaced lines!

Duration

/bi/, /bid/, /bit/

Resonances in the mouth

You know what’s created entirely by resonances in the mouth?

Vowels

What is a vowel?

• A vowel is voicing passing through (and resonating in) an unobstructed vocal tract!

• If we change the position of the tongue, we change the resonances

What is a vowel?

A vowel is voicing passing through (and resonating in) an unobstructed vocal tract!

If we change the position of the tongue, we change the resonances

• Different resonances filter the sound differently and determine the vowel quality

• Different tongue shapes create different resonances, and different vowels!

What do vowels sound like?

• We talk about vowel quality in terms of “formants”

• These are bands of the spectrum where the energy is strongest

• The frequencies of these formants are our primary cues to vowels

Different American English vowels, as spoken by a male speaker

If the position of the tongue causes formants to appear…

• What happens in diphthongs, where the tongue moves?

Formants alone can be enough for some perception!

Let’s listen to some sounds

Let’s listen to some sounds

Now let’s play all three at once!

Does this help?

So, we think about vowels in terms of formants

Different American English vowels, as spoken by a male speaker

Vowel formants are reflections of articulations

• They vary depending on the tongue’s position

  • … as well as the size and shape of the talker’s head

• Different formants from the same speaker mean different vowels

  • … kind of

Vowel perception is really, really hard

• … so, consonants must be easy, right?

Consonant Acoustics

/l r w j/ act a lot like vowels

Nasals look like quiet vowels

Fricatives have little black clouds

• … and the cloud is higher frequency as you get closer to the mouth

Voiced fricatives have little clouds and voicing

For stops, the signal… stops (with voicing)

For stops, the signal… stops (without voicing)

Taps are really tricky to spot

Let’s Practice!

Animals will finds cute

• Chickadees, Cats, Dogs, Pandas, Koalas, Owls, Velociraptors, Woodpeckers