Name/Collaborator: Travis West

Title of class: Voice IPA and Language

Date of class: Sept 2 2014
Date submitted: Sept 10 2014

Key terms and definitions [5 15 words each]:
Phonetics: The study of phones.
IPA: Alphabet of phones and suprasegmentals.
Vocal Tract: Lungs, larynx, mouth, and nose. Used to make and shape speech sounds.
Articulatory Phonetics: The study of how phones are shaped in the vocal tract.
Formant (a): A spectral envelope peak caused by a resonance. (I prefer this definition)
Formant (b): A resonance that causes a spectral envelope peak.

Secondary terms and definitions [5 15 words each]:
Phones: Speech sounds which combine to make language.
Suprasegmentals: Variations in speech sound which occur simultaneously with other more distinct
temporally separable segments.
Manner of Articulation: How airflow is constricted in a consonant. Basically, how close are the
articulators?
Place of Articulation: Where in the mouth / which parts of the mouth constrict the airflow in a
consonant.
Consonant: A speech segment where the airflow is heavily restricted or completely stopped.
Vowel: A speech segment where the airflow is less restricted.
Orthography: The study of the way things are written in languages with writing.

Sources accessed [Name, URL]:
English Phonemic Chart
http://www.learnbritishenglish.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Phonetics.jpg

IPA for Language Learning - basic phonetics (Linguistics lessons for language learners)
http://www.nativlang.com/linguistics/ipa-pronunciation-lessons.php

International Phonetic Alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

792px-IPA_chart_2005_png.svg.png (7921024)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/IPA_chart_2005_png.svg/792px-
IPA_chart_2005_png.svg.png

IPA Charts
http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/

Consonants
http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/consonants.html

Vowels
http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/vowels.html

Suprasegmentals
http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/suprasegmentals.html

IPA Website
https://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/handbook.html
Linguistics

Glossary of Linguistic Terms n-z
http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/grammar/main_files/definitionsn-z.htm

Phonetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetics

What is a phone?
http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/glossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhone.htm

Acoustic phonetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_phonetics

Phonology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology

Phoneme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

Morphology (linguistics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics)

Morpheme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme

Semiotics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

Syntax - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax

Semantics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics

Pragmatics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics

Voice Acoustics: an introduction to the science of speech and singing
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/voice.html

What is a formant?
http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/formant.html

The National Center for Voice and Speech
http://www.ncvs.org/ncvs/tutorials/voiceprod/tutorial/rules.html

Vocal tract - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_tract

Articulatory phonetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

Place of articulation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_articulation

Manner of articulation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manner_of_articulation

Larynx - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larynx#Sound_generation

Glottis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottis

YouTube Videos watched:
Sivu - Better Man Than He (Official Video), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_964dqQxQwY

Graphics [title, URL]:
Location of vocal organs and possible places of articulation,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/3597/Location-of-vocal-organs-and-

Places of Articulation
http://www-01.sil.org/mexico/ling/glosario/sup/E005ci-PlacesArticulation.gif

Executive Summary: Articulation and formants differentiate, and IPA notates, phones that make
phonemes, morphemes, words, and languages.

The study of language is a vast and varied field, comprising many subfields, each with pet projects
and areas of study. Language is made of discourse, utterances, sentences, and phrases, all of which
are made of words. At this level, language is studied by the vast field of semiotics, which considers
meaning, in a word. Words themselves are broken down into morphemes, lexemes, and phonemes,
which are made of phones, which are made of sound. All of the -emes are distinguished by having
meaning within specific languages, and are studied by corresponding -ologies (and lexis).

Phones are individual speech sounds, which when considered by themselves are meaningless,
insofar as any given phone does not signify anything in particular, or at all. They are only
meaningful when combined to make -eme things, and words. They are studied by phonetics, itself a
fairly large field.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) attempts to give every phone a different letter, to allow
languages to be transcribed phonetically, i.e. based on the sounds which are spoken rather than the
meanings of the words or orthography of the language. The IPA is published in a series of useful
charts, as well as a 200 page handbook. It gives symbols for meaningfully distinguishable speech
segments, and suprasegmental sounds.

While very thorough, the IPA does not have a different symbol for every possible sound in all of
human language. Sounds which are not known to distinguish meanings in any language are not
included in the IPA, for example the spectrally very different possible variations of a velar plosive as
demonstrated in class (Example 1) are not distinguished by the IPA, because they are not
linguistically relevant.

Articulatory phonetics categorizes speech segments generated in the vocal tract. The vocal tract is
the system which is used to produce and shape phones. It consists of the lungs, larynx, oral cavity
and tongue, and nasal cavity. The lungs supply aerodynamic energy in the form of airflow to the
larynx, where the vocal folds may or may not vibrate. Vocal fold vibration is called voicing in
linguistics.. Air may then enter the oral cavity, or be redirected by the back tongue to the nasal
cavity. The oral cavity is used as a rich filtering and articulating chamber that shapes voiced sounds
to distinguish vowels and/or constricts air flow to generate turbulence making consonants, as
described below. The nasal cavity resonates dissimilarly to the oral cavity, providing more unique
phones, called nasals.

Consonants are categorized based on where the airflow originates (pulmonic, or non-pulmonic, see
Example 4 for ), where in the mouth the articulators restrict the airflow (Examples 2), and in what
way they restrict the airflow (Examples 3. See also, Sivu, link above, also see IPA charts, above). The
combination of place and manner give rise to a wide variety of sounds, almost all of which are in the
IPA charts. (See Interactive IPA Charts)

Vowels are classified by the shape of the oral cavity, which acts like a filter on the source sound of
phonation. A vowel can be open or closed, front or back, or a vowel can be rounded or unrounded.
See observations of the way changing vowels alters the formant quality of vowels in examples 5, 6,
and 7. In general, F1 rises as a vowel is closed, and lowers as a vowel is constricted to the front,
while F2 rises when a vowel is fronted. Both formants lower when a vowel is rounded. F3 and F4
and so on are not significant in distinguishing vowels, rather lending each voice their unique timbre.

Many trained singers learn to control the resonances that drive formants in order to achieve better
efficiency, or a desired quality of tone. Operatic singers in particular are known for having a singer's
formant at around 3 kHz, which helps them to be heard over the sound of the orchestra, in part
because the orchestra takes up room much lower in the spectrum, and in part because the human
auditory canal is especially sensitive to sound in this exact region. Sopranos may also learn to tune
the resonance of their voice to the pitch that they are singing in the high register.

Personal Comments:
In the end I gutted out almost half of what I wrote, mostly about more abstracted meaningful
components of language in semiology etc. These topics are interesting to me, and offer potentially
useful ways of thinking when considering the meaning of music, and especially electroacoustic and
other more niche musics, but they are less relevant to the course directly. I guess I can probably
look forward to gutting out more research next week in the name of brevity.

Of all the topics I researched, formants are the trickiest I think. In particular, the confusion over
what exactly a formant is, whether it be a resonance, or a spectral peak. In my own sonograms in
particular, I fairly uncertain whether I have the right idea of what constitutes a formant.