Evaluating Formants

To me, this activity was one of the most interesting things we have done so far. I love studying acoustics and actually did projects on the acoustics of instruments, especially the piano, for two different classes last year. I find the similarities between the piano and our vocal chords so interesting. I had a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what we were supposed to do and how to view the formants in pratt, but I think I figured it out. I recorded myself saying "heed, hid, head, had, hod, hawed, hood, and who'd" like the author in the reading we did. Then when I went to plot the data, I selected view formant list, and then it gave me the values of the first five formants for that vowel. The only thing I wasn't sure about when measuring the formant values was what part of the formant I was supposed to pick. Some of them sloped either up or down, so I wasn't always sure exactly what point I was supposed to evaluate it at. The values that I got did seem to line up well with most of the values in Figure 8.5 in the text, though, which I think is a good sign. Wen I plotted the points on the blank graph in the text, I put the F1 frequency on the vertical axis and the difference between F1 and F2 on the horizontal axis because that's what the author did on his graph in figure 8.7. My graph looks very similar to his with the exception of the vowels for the words hood and who'd. For those two, my F2 value was much larger, and thus the difference between F1 and F2 is much larger. I love learning about acoustics, I think the way that sound is generated into speech is amazing and I can't wait to start learning about it in class tomorrow!

Linguistic Profiling Quiz

I thought that the quiz was really interesting. After the first one, I thought that it was going to be really easy because I knew right away that the first speaker was African American. When I got to the third speaker, however, I was shocked at how hard it was. The third speaker and the first speaker were both black, but their accents were so different! The first had the accent that I am used to, with the more pronounced near open/near front vowel sounds in words like went and Mary. The third speaker was much more difficult for me to categorize because he had much more of a Caribbean accent, which is not something I'm used to. The second speaker was a caucasian male, and he was actually kind of difficult for me to; I had to listen to it a few times. I think it's because he had a bit of an accent that I'm not really used to, so I wasn't sure whether it was a white man with an accent from somewhere else in the country or someone of a different ethnicity. The fourth and fifth speakers were also hard for me to guess, I couldn't really hear their accents, but I was immediately able to guess that the sixth speaker was latino. When he said the "o" sound in snow and go, it had more of a "u" sound in it as well which really stood out to me. The seventh and tenth speakers were very easy for me to pinpoint because I recognized the middle eastern and indian accents. The eighth speaker was also pretty obviously a black man. He did some of what I said earlier about having the near open/near front vowel more prominent in words like went and Mary, but he also seemed to cut off the ends of some of his words which, for me at least, tipped me off. In some ways I thought that the accents would be much easier to figure out than they were. I was very surprised at how much trouble I had with some of them, but to me that just goes to show how used to many accents I've become, that they don't even really sound that different to me anymore.

"The Butter Spilled on the Cot" analysis

The first time I recorded myself, I spoke in the way that I would say "The Butter Spilled on the Cot" in an everyday situation. The second time, I accented u in butter and the o in cot. I tried to make both of them sound more like the a in Alex. The differences in the spectogram are very interesting. For the word butter, both times there was an apparent stop in the middle of the word at the "tt". When I said it naturally, the amplitudes of the first and second syllables were very similar. When I implemented the accent and tried to make the u sound more like the a in Alex, the amplitude of the first syllable was much larger than that of the second. The rest of the spectogram of when I spoke naturally has pretty steady amplitudes, rising and falling numerous times throughout the rest of the sentence. On the spectogram of me speaking with the accent, though, there is a very low amplitude until I get to the word cot, where it suddenly peaks again and the lines become much larger and closer together.

Class on 9/29/08 and IPA

Last Monday was a very interesting class. It was funny to see how the quiz got such wrong results in some cases. I agree that the quiz should have had a few additions made to the questions so that the accents could have been pinpointed correctly. Reading the articles was so interesting! I've never heard the Appalachian English accent, so it was really cool reading about the words that sound so different from the way I would pronounce them. Reading the other articles on my own was a good experience too because I got to see how people talked about accents and dialects in a much more informal way. They didn't have the fancy lingo that some other sites use to explain accents which made it much clearer to me.

Learning about the IPA was so interesting too! I thought it was really cool how all of our names were put up on the board in IPA, it was a really creative and fun way to introduce us to the alphabet. While I pretty much understand how the alphabet works, I know that there's no way I'm comfortable enough with it yet to use it on any level. The symbols and terminology are all so foreign to me, but I'm sure it will get easier with time. It was funny when we were all trying to make all of the sounds; some of them are so difficult!