4.0 Problems of formant estimation at higher F0
Another problem that may occur in the acoustic analysis of vowels is the extensive variation of F0. Existing formant statistics document formant patterns only for fundamental frequencies (F0) typical of ‘normal speech’ and do not include substantial variation. Formant patterns on different fundamental frequencies mostly only relate to the comparison of different speaker groups, i.e. children, women, and men (e.g., Petersen & Barney, 1952, Hillenbrand, 1995).
Numerous studies have, in fact, investigated acoustic characteristics of vowel sounds that include an extensive variation of F0 in the context of singing and acting (e.g., Sundberg & Skoog, 1997; Joliveau et al., 2004; Garnier et al., 2010). Further results of acoustic analysis of sounds that include a high variation of F0 are reported from studies on strong emotional expressions, like shouting (e.g., Traunmüller, 1988) and crying (Murry et al., 1977), and from studies on vowel synthesis (e.g., Sundberg, 2006).
Our observations have shown that an extensive variation of F0, exceeding one octave, also appears in everyday life as a characteristic of normal speech (figure 2), so does not only concern artistic, interpretative, and entertaining utterances.
If it holds true that vowels are fairly intelligible at higher F0, the question arises, how listeners can categorize acoustic realizations of vowels at varying fundamental frequencies. This question becomes even more interesting when considering that, for example, female speakers easily produce vowels up to 500 Hz, and thus, utterances, where F0 exceeds values found for several F1 in previous studies (e.g., [iː, yː, uː], for which F1 is around 350 Hz for German vowels produced by fe...
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...y of Music (pp. 69–106), 3rd Edition. Waltham, MA: Academic Press.
Sundberg, J., Lã, F. M. B., & Gill, B. P. (2011). Professional male singers’ formant tuning strategies for the vowel /a/. Logopedics, phoniatrics, vocology, 36(4), 156–167.
Thalén, M., & Sundberg, J. (2001). Describing different styles of singing. A comparison of a female singer’s voice source in ‘Classical’, ‘Pop’, ‘Jazz’ and ‘Blues’. Logopedics, phoniatrics, vocology, 26(2), 82–93.
Traunmüller, H. (1988). Paralinguistic variation and invariance in the characteristic frequencies of vowels. Phonetica, 45(1), 1–29.
Willems, L. F. (1986). Robust formant analysis. IPO Annual report, 529, 1-25. Eindhoven: Institute for Perception Research.
Wolfe, J., Garnier, M., & Smith, J. (2009). Vocal tract resonances in speech, singing and playing musical instruments. Human Frontier Science Program Journal, 3, 6-23.
In an experiment, around 350 Chicagoans, were recorded reading the following paragraph, titled “Too Hot for Hockey”, this script was written specifically to force readers to vocalize vowels “that reveal how closely key sounds resemble the accent's dominant traits” (Wbez). The paragraph is as follows:
Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). 12. Anatomy & physiology for speech,
I decided to go about this assignment by making a table (table 1.) and marking how many times I hear or notice nine different vocal changes, as well as certain miscellaneous anomalies.
The phonemic restoration phenomenon was first demonstrated by Warren (1970). He conducted an experiment on a number of listeners where he got them to listen to the sentence, “The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city”. However, in the word “legislatures” a cough completely masked the medial “s”. Listeners stated hearing the masked phoneme. This showed that when phonemic restoration occurred, listeners were not able to identify the masking sound position in the sentence. What they received was unconsciously interpreted. In other words, the efficiency of phonemic restoration reached the extent that the listeners did not notice it. (Kashino, 2006). Amazingly, the phonemic restoration effect was not observed when “s” was masked with silence!
Spanish and English share a similar alphabet, with the Spanish sound system being more concise. Many differences are revealed when comparing the phonologies of the two languages. These differences will influence the speech of Spanish speakers learning English. Speakers may transfer their knowledge of Spanish to English. Understanding these differences is important to the speech-language pathologist in order to realize why some English sounds are more difficult for the Spanish speaker to produce than others (Gorman & Kester, 2001).
Hixon, T. J., Weismer, G., & Hoit, J. D. (2014). Preclinical Speech Science: Anatomy, Physiology, Acoustics, Perception. San Diego, CA: Pleural Publishing Inc.
Amateur voice teachers, amateur singers, and amateur listeners often associate straight-tone singing with correct Baroque performance practice (Almirena). This idea is probably an outgrowth of the way scholars understand correct d...
Tubbs and Moss (1991) stated that “paralinguistic or paralanguage is something beyond or in addition to language itself” (p. 164). Generally, paralanguage focus on the study of oral cues rather than the communication content (Karimi, Dabaghi & Tabatabaei, 2012). So, Trager (1958) has divided paralanguage into two major categories which is voice qualities and voice vocalizations. Pitch, tone, volume, rhythm, enunciation, articulation and pronunciation are all belong to vocal qualities. While, vocal vocalization contains vocal characteristics which mainly attach with emotion like laughing, crying and yawning; and vocal segregate with minimal response such as “um”, “oh” and so on. Paralanguage is crucial in order to identify the emotional state of the communicator. For instance, if a person speaks with high volume and pitch, this probably shows that the person is in angry and
Style has been an integral component in the field of linguistics. Linguistic style refers to a person’s speaking pattern, which can include different features such as pace, pitch, intonation, syntactic patterns, etc. Styles of speech is learned, and is often influenced by location, gender, ethnicity, and age. As different cultures and sub-cultures arise, linguistic variations occur and different sociolinguistic styles come into being. Each style can index social meanings such as group membership, personal attributes or beliefs.
Researchers have provided different classifications of speech errors. They can be categorized according to the “linguistic units,” such as “phonological feature, phoneme, syllable, morpheme, word phrase, or sentence levels” (Harely, 2001, p. 376). Moreover, speech errors can be classified according to the “mechanisms” of the speech errors (Harely, 2001, p. 376). For example, Carroll (2007) classified eight of the basic types of slips of the tongue according to the error mechanism from the previous psycholinguistic studies. These errors include shift, exchanges, anticipations, perseveration, additions, deletions, substitutions, and blends.
The voice is our primary mean of communication and expression. We rarely last more than a few minutes without its use whether it is talking to someone else or humming quietly to ourselves. We can use the voice artistically in many ways. For example, singing carries the rhythm and melody of speech. It creates patterns of pitch, loudness, and duration that tie together syllables, phrases and sentences. We use the voice for survival, emotion, expression, and to reflect our personality. The loss of the voice is a severe curtailment to many professions. It is affected by general body condition which is why we need to consider the location of the larynx and how that organ produces voice. Surprisingly, this complex biological design is mechanical in function. It is mechanical to the point that when it has been excised from a cadaver and mounted on a laboratory bench, the larynx produces sounds resembling normal phonation. (Titze, Principles)
These three groups were then asked to complete three different tasks. The first was to repeat and segment 20 different words (5 consonant-vowel-consonant, 5 CCVC, 5 CVCC, and 5 CCVCC) and two overall scores were administered to the participants. Both scores were out of a maximum of 20 points; the first score was based on giving 1 point for each correctly analyzed word, and the second score was based on giving 1 point for correctly analyzing medial vowels.
Working Paper No. -. 239. The syllable of the syllable. Vol.
Nooteboom, Sieb G. 1969. The tongue slips into patterns. Leyden (studies in linguistics and phonetics. The Hague: Mouton, 114- 32
Voegeli, F. (2005). Differences in the speech of men and women. Retrieved from www.venusboyz.com/ PDF/ DissertationFVoegeli.pdf