Questions tagged [acoustic-analysis]
Models and methodology for analysing raw speech signals. Whereas articulation serves as the qualitative foundation of phonetics, acoustic analysis serves as the quantitative foundation.
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acoustic means of distinguishing between fricatives
I work on data from an under-described language. I am consulting two sources that present phonemic inventories of the same language.
One source posits that the language has a phonemic voiceless velar ...
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When the short /i/ sound in English is lenthened very much (in singing, for example), will its quality change so it resembles long /i:/?
In singing, when a singer lengthens a word that contains short /i/, will it cause any confusion (between that short /i/ and the long /i:/) for the native English speaker's ear?
When I listened to this ...
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Voice Onset Time, Onsets, Codas, and Pre- & Post-Aspiration
Whilst we're all familiar with voicing on an intuitive and/or phonological level, the actual acoustic phonetics are somewhat less intuitive to many of us.
The main way of formalising this intuitive ...
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How to read a spectrogram?
I read some materials online How to Read a Spectrogram, Reading Spectrograms: Consonants, Reading Spectrograms: Vowels. I still have no idea how to analyze a spectrogram. Could anyone explain with the ...
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Evidence for segmental phonology in the acoustic speech signal
What evidence for segmental phonology could be found in the acoustic speech signal?
I think the parameters of acoustic speech signals include f0, amplitude, duration, wave form, etc., which are ...
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Why does /zd-/ require more effort even though both the consonants have the same voicing?
In most language, the rule for combining consonants is that they should have the same voice. For example: in English, a word can never start with /zt-/ but can start with /st-/. It's not that /zt-/ ...
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Unmoving F1 / formant below F1?
I'm trying to understand some basics, hope this is an ok question.
Here's a recording of me producing /i/, /ɛ/, /a/: https://namakajiri.net/misc/i%c9%9ba.webm
nevermind the transition between the ...
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The reason for a partly voiced hold in I’d
In I’d take ’d t can be pronounced as [t] with the first part of the hold voiced (the second one and the plosion with aspiration are voiceless).
How is it better explained: is it because of [ai] (...
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Distinguishing between [s] and [ʪ] in spectrogram
Is there is a way to differentiate between [s] and [ʪ] using spectral analysis (Pratt or spectrum view or any other software)? Is there is any particular pattern that only appears with the [ʪ]?
[ʪ] ...
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How to compare the F2 values of the vowels statistically?
How can we compare the F2 values of the vowels produced by ten speakers? There are only two vowels to be investigated. Therefore, 20 vowels are produced in total. I believe paired t-test is the way to ...
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Praat: How does pitch floor affect number of frames?
With reference to the documentation for the ToPitch function, http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Sound__To_Pitch___.html
pitch floor will determine the length of the analysis window, and always ...
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Praat: Interpretation of row number when inspecting sound file
When I inspect a sound file in Praat, I see the following picture:
I understand that Praat creates a ny x nx matrix using these values, and that 'nx' refers to the number of frames in the WAV file. ...
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How does Praat map quantized values to frequency statistics?
I'm working with 16-bit WAV files. As far as I understand, amplitude is measured at a sampling rate of 44100 samples/second (i.e. Hertz), with each sample being represented as binary data through ...
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Is it possible to recognize place of articulation of consonants through spectrograms?
I am trying to undestand how PRAAT works and to recognize consonants through spectrograms. I Know that it's possible to distinguish fricative consonants from nasal ones (for example) but is it ...
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How to measure auditory distances between vowels
(Followup to this question, also related to this answer.)
The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (1999: 11–2) defines the values of cardinal vowels as follows:
[T]wo fully front ...
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Why were the formants of high and back vowels difficult to obtain? And why not anymore?
I was reading the second chapter of Three Areas of Experimental Phonetics by Peter Ladefoged (1967), in which he summarizes the studies he conducted in the 1950s and 1960s which demonstrated practical ...
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What's the relationship between harmonics and formants?
I'm new in speech-processing and there are some notions confused me.
Through Fourier Transform, we can get spectra of specific sound signals, the harmonic frequencies can be shown as the peaks in the ...
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Should I include this piece in the vowel? [spectrogram]
I'm trying to measure vowel length in 'beat", utterance-final. Should I place the marker where it is now or further to the right, as there is some activity there?
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Voicing Into Closure? [segmentation, waveform and spectrogram form Praat]
I'm wondering for how long the voicing persists into closure here, if at all. At about 50% into the closure I would say it's noise only from there on, nevermind F1. But what about the oscillations ...
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Formant frequencies of consonants
In the old days, phones were defined by the requisite articulation, both consonants and vowels. As time wore on and science and technology advanced, vowels became better defined by their acoustic ...
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Software request: Spectrograms that represent intensity with a colour gradient
There is a range of computer programs that can represent acoustic energy graphically in a spectrogram. I usually use Praat, which uses a black and white gradient to represent the intensity of energy ...
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Why do retroflex and postalveolar fricatives sound so similar despite the quite different positions of the tongue?
If they sound so similar, does it mean that they have a larger chance to be free variants of a phoneme and even become the other in a sound change. Do they play different or similar role in sound ...
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How harmonic is speech?
I have read that voiced sounds are harmonic, e.g. the frequency spectrum consists of integer multiples of F0. If these are precise integer multiples, the human voice would be considered a perfect ...
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Is it appropriate to say that [ɕ] is an intermediate form of [ʃ ç]?
The description is found in a paper about the German fricatives
https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/labphon.2014.5.issue-1/lp-2014-0005/lp-2014-0005.xml
How do the three sound differ from each other in ...
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How do people discern different plosives without formant transition?
People can discern wether a plosive is /p t k/ by formant transition of a vowel. While how do people discern them, if it is a consonant cluster of few plosives without any voicing, as [pt] or even ...
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What are the features that distinguish a velar /k/ from an uvular /q/ in a spectrogram?
I am trying to annotate a recording of a language that has both velar k and uvular q. It’s tricky because I can’t always distinguish the two phonemes by ear.
What features may I see in a spectrogram ...
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Sentence stress detection
I was looking for APIs for the detection of sentence stress, also known as prosodic stress, based on input audio.
(Ideally, I was hoping for a library able to assess the level of prominence of a ...
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Measuring phonetic correlates of stress (intensity in particular)
It's normal enough for people to say that we can attribute the percept of 'stress accent' to certain acoustic correlates – usually higher relative fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration of ...
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Why can increasing the speed of closing the vocal folds increases the loudness?
In Henning Reetz and Allard Jongman's Phonetics, they mentioned a way to increase the loudness is to increase the speed of closing the vocal folds. The points are summarized below:
The the most ...
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Acoustic parameters for phonation
does anyone know what the acoustic parameter of phonation is in a sound wave? I mean, how can we recognize if a sound is voiced or voiceless (and devoiced, of course) based on its wave?
I've been ...
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What's the acoustic difference between laterals and nasals
I have a hard time distinguishing nasals and laterals on the spectrogram. They both seem to exhibit lower amplitude, and I think on average nasals have lower F1. Are there any sources on the acoustic ...
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What is the unit of the amplitude on the y-axis in a sound waveform?
I just learned that the difference in dB is 20 times the log of the voltage ratio of two sounds. But, it just occurred to me, what is the unit of the amplitude on the y-axis in a waveform? Is that "...
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Acoustic signal to phones?
I am currently trying to understand speech perception, and are at the moment a bit stuck.. I seem to understand how the ear process incoming sound, but i don't understand the concept of phones. Why ...
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Speech signal analysis: What can be seen in the signal?
I know that the only speech phenomena one can see in a speech signal are those that arise from articulator movement and which have features that aid perception (like energy as particular freqs+times ...
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How do linguists place the vowels of a language precisely on the vowel trapezoid?
Since vowels in human speech are a continuous spectrum rather than a discrete set, many descriptions of languages I’ve seen — not only on Wikipedia — place the vowels of a language as dots in a two-...
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Rare diphthongs
One would think that as long as one of the two vowels are closed, then a diphthong could be formed.
However, if a diphthong consists of two closed vowels with the same roundness, like the following 8 ...
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Praat: CPP from modified .Manipulation file
I am working with dysphonic speech and Praat's automated pulse detection algorithm is inadequate, so I manually correct the placement of pulses using .Manipulation files.
My ultimate goal is to ...
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How can I distinguish different consonants in Praat/acoustic analysis?
How can I distinguish different consonants based on acoustic information/spectrographic analysis such as in Praat? Is there a list of acoustic cues for different consonants like there is for average ...
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Acoustic difference in breathing in and breathing out
Many people can distinguish whether a person is inhaling or exhaling only by audio, even when the tongue and the lip position (=formants) is the same. That must mean there is a difference in the ...
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What are the advantages of using ToBI for prosodic analysis?
I am a grad student who wants to compare the prosody of two of my classmates from different regions who speak different dialects of English.
The obvious tool to use is ToBI, of course because it ...
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Praat's y-axis in spectrum graph
We have a tone in notched noise in Praat. We want the noise to be 23 dB less than the tone, so we created a noise coefficient using SNR, applied this to the noise file, and combined it with the tone ...
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How do I draw just one channel of a waveform in Praat?
I have a nice 2-channel recording in Praat. I want to illustrate the waveform for an article, but when I select file>draw visible sound, the result is both channels. Is there any way to adjust this so ...
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Amplitude as the y-axis on a waveform
I just noticed, perhaps naively, that the representation of amplitude on the y-axis of a waveform is somewhat paradoxical. Although the space between each value on the y-axis is identical, the units ...
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What are "Slices" of a spectrogram?
Reading over my class notes, I see that you can consider a spectrogram is being comprised of many "slices" (static spectra? Whatever that means) horizontally, making it so "time appears continuous".
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What's the difference between the output of an oscilloscope and the waveform I get when I record on Praat?
I know it's probably a dumb question, but is this the same thing? Thanks!
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Evidence of connections between f0 and a physiological parameter?
I have the impression that physiological parameters like e.g. the size of neck will alter their f0. It's just an impression but it seems to hold - I can usually guess someone's neck size over the ...
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What is the difference between cepstral and temporal domains?
Some parameters of speech analysis occur in the temporal domain (those are the ones I typically understand: f0, formants, etc.) - but others occur in the so-called cepstral domain. If I google "...
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How was the acoustic theory of speech production informed by electrical circuit theory?
The acoustic theory of speech production as worked out by Gunnar Fant depends on a correspondence between the vocal tract and elementary electrical circuits. But the quote below perplexes me. In what ...
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In what way did the invention of the telephone shape the development of phonetic theory?
According to my rudimentary understanding of electronics, the telephone transforms sounds to an electric medium transmitted to a receiver over wires. You don't really need phonetics to make that work, ...
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How was phonetics performed with a phonograph?
How was phonetics performed with a phonograph? From the Wikipedia excerpt below, I guess it went something like this:
A segment was recorded on a phonograph.
That segment was Filtered each time with ...
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