8
votes
Accepted
What's the relationship between harmonics and formants?
why the harmonic frequencies are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency?
Physics!
Pretty much all of the physical processes that create vibrations at a base frequency, also create vibrations ...
- 64k
6
votes
Why were the formants of high and back vowels difficult to obtain? And why not anymore?
Is point 2 above still true?
Not any more, thankfully!
If not, why was it so difficult?
Back when this paper was written, spectrograms of sound were right on the cutting edge of technology. They ...
- 64k
5
votes
Formant frequencies of consonants
All segments were given an acoustic definition in the feature theories of Jakobson, Fant & Halle (1951) and Jakobson & Halle (1956). Many of the features were passed down to Chomsky & ...
- 82k
5
votes
Accepted
Amplitude as the y-axis on a waveform
It’s not practical or reasonable to scale sound intensity linearly. It’s impractical because the resulting visuals would be unreadable, and it’s unreasonable because (simplifying a little) humans ...
- 2,502
5
votes
Is it possible to recognize place of articulation of consonants through spectrograms?
It is possible, in principle, to distinguish consonant place of articulation with spectrograms, within certain limits of precision, but only given certain prior knowledge. It used to be a standard ...
- 82k
4
votes
Accepted
What are the advantages of using ToBI for prosodic analysis?
You can't use the standard f0 analysis. There's no such thing as standard. You need a framework e.g. Autosegmental-meterical Phonology (AM)
supposing you are going to work in the phonological category
...
- 1,265
4
votes
Acoustic signal to phones?
Phones are a "thing" because they were the first decent method of objectively and accurately recording unwritten languages (in the 19th century). Back then, if you heard a Lushootseed speaker ...
- 82k
4
votes
Accepted
What's the acoustic difference between laterals and nasals
This may be a useful overview, also this (ultimately, Johnson “Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics” chapter 9, not online). Nasals have anti-formants at 1100 Hz and 3300 Hz, laterals at 2100 Hz, and the ...
- 82k
4
votes
Voicing Into Closure? [segmentation, waveform and spectrogram form Praat]
Your spectrogram is not clear. You should use a narrow-band spectrogram to see formants efficiently. So change your settings. To obtain this visualisation, you should use a small window length as it ...
- 1,517
4
votes
Accepted
Formant frequencies of consonants
Unfortunately, the answer is no.
The space of vowels is continuous: given any two vowels, you can find a midpoint between them, and that's also a perfectly valid vowel that people can pronounce.
But ...
- 64k
4
votes
Accepted
How do people discern different plosives without formant transition?
Richard Wright discusses this w.r.t. Tsou, which has a number of initial stop clusters, e.g. pka:ko "to escape", tpihi "mend cloth" (and other kinds of clusters, but stop clusters are the most ...
- 82k
4
votes
Why does /zd-/ require more effort even though both the consonants have the same voicing?
This is just a subjective feeling that really depends on your native language or the languages you are used to speaking. Other languages are fine with this particular combination.
For example, in my ...
- 1,218
3
votes
What are the features that distinguish a velar /k/ from an uvular /q/ in a spectrogram?
This is somewhat surprisingly hard to determine. The best study on the topic that I know of is Denzer-King's study of Tlingit. The basic strategy is to compare the frequency and amplitude of higher ...
- 82k
3
votes
Sentence stress detection
Searching online returns quite a few results, some of which are quite tailored to your needs:
Tepperman, J., & Narayanan, S. (2005, March). Automatic syllable stress detection using prosodic ...
- 3,431
3
votes
Sentence stress detection
I also don't know of any ready-made tool that does this. It would be very helpful to know roughly what you were hoping to use this for, since that would dictate exactly what kind of tool you would ...
- 131
3
votes
Accepted
What is the unit of the amplitude on the y-axis in a sound waveform?
None of the above. The waveform display program shows the raw sampled numbers (not anything in decibels), but there can also be an intensity curve, in dB, superimposed on the waveform display. In ...
- 82k
3
votes
How harmonic is speech?
I'm not aware of any work on this topic in linguistic phonetics, but there may be something out there in musical acoustics for voice. The main problem for quantifying inharmonicity is detecting ...
- 82k
3
votes
What are the advantages of using ToBI for prosodic analysis?
It’s true that there is a learning curve, but I’m not sure what the alternative is. What does ‘f0 analysis’ mean here? How can you interpret changes in pitch, intensity, duration without an ...
- 2,502
2
votes
Praat's y-axis in spectrum graph
The number you get in Query ---> Get Intensity... is the mean intensity of the sound which for the sound file I have is 81.49346601915424 dB when I open the sound file in View and edit and select ...
- 1,265
2
votes
What's the difference between the output of an oscilloscope and the waveform I get when I record on Praat?
Though I haven't worked with an oscilloscope directly but I presume both are the same.
sine wave in oscilloscope
sine wave in Praat
- 1,265
2
votes
How do I draw just one channel of a waveform in Praat?
You can either downmix it to mono, or delete one channel. choosing one over the other depends on your situation. if your channels are identical you can delete one, if your channels are not identical ...
- 1,265
2
votes
What are "Slices" of a spectrogram?
Good answers!
A simpler way to look at it might be that frequencies only exist over time, never in an instant. So, if you analyze a waveform for frequencies, you have to decide over what period of ...
- 239
2
votes
Rare diphthongs
The basic phonetic property explaining this rareness is that the sounds are too similar. You can add to the list things like [iɪ], [ɛe] and so on, where there is also just a subtle shift in F1 or F2 ...
- 82k
2
votes
What are "Slices" of a spectrogram?
Everything about sound in the digital world presents discrete (not continuous) values which represent "what is happening in this (physically continuous) time span out there". It is impossible to ...
- 82k
2
votes
Accepted
Why can increasing the speed of closing the vocal folds increases the loudness?
This picture may be useful (likewise this article). The thing of interest is the glottal flow derivative, modeled in this paper (fig. 2 has an analogous graph). The flow derivative is held to be the ...
- 82k
2
votes
Accepted
Acoustic parameters for phonation
Voicing is defined as the semi-periodic vibration of the vocal folds. Accordingly, you look to see if there is something that happens repeatedly at a reasonably low but not ridiculously low frequency, ...
- 82k
2
votes
Measuring phonetic correlates of stress (intensity in particular)
I assume your goal is to describe the acoustics of "stress accent" in a language, distinguishing between stressed and unstressed syllables. Then you would treat amplitude and F0 in basically the same ...
- 82k
2
votes
Why do retroflex and postalveolar fricatives sound so similar despite the quite different positions of the tongue?
Both the retroflex and postalveolar fricatives are sibilants and are therefore louder than other consonants. /ʃ/ and /ʂ/ are the two lowest pitched among sibilants.
Urdu inherited Sanskrit /ʂ/ as /ʃ/ ...
- 2,765
2
votes
Accepted
Distinguishing between [s] and [ʪ] in spectrogram
You will probably have to dig elsewhere to find actual data on lateral lisps. One large caveat is that you can't compare children and adults, and the data on characteristic properties of phonemes will ...
- 82k
2
votes
The reason for a partly voiced hold in I’d
You need to frame this as a broader and testable question, and the investigation has to be conducted with some underlying theory of what might be happening. I think you can probably control speaker, ...
- 82k
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