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!