#praat

[text-post-rants]

It has been two years of listening to sleep token and I am still obsessed with vessel’s wacky mouth sounds. He does things with his breath, his vowels and consonants that are so deliberate that I can’t help but obsess over. Sometimes I get fixated on the fact that somewhere there are extremely high quality audio files of his vocals and yet I can’t have them. I want to run them through my software and analyze the sound waves. But instead I play vocals only YouTube videos into my computer. What good is a M.A. in speech and hearing science if I can’t get the high quality spectrograms I want. Will Ramos’s larynx is not enough for the SLP’s who like metal community. I will never be satisfied.

(This is a joke obviously. I listened to caramel. I’m not entitled to audio files. I just crave knowledge. But I respect boundaries and am happy with the amount I am given. I’m trying to say I like the new album and am going to tunnel vision on phonemes again. While also shouting out Will Ramos for participating in a YouTube video where he had a laryngoscopy)

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

Ok! Gifts for two of my linguistics professors are done. Any ideas for crochetable things related to semantics, syntax, or translation are welcome.

[aro-antic]

goodbye brat summer, hello praat autumn

[ah0yh0y]

someday I will be able to identity what vowles in a spectrogram and consonants

[apineforest]

Obsessed with when programs used by niche fields have terrible icons.

This is an indispensable software in linguistics for spectral analysis of speech sounds.

I would pay you money if you could prove to me the icon art wasnt made in ms paint

In writing this post ive found the team who work on praat have updated the icon art and i think theyre cowards.

[allthingslinguistic]

Pitch, intonation, and the role of technology in language description

A detailed discussion of pitch, intonation, and the role of technology in language description in Gizmodo. Excerpt: 

In school, we generally learn about two types of speech sounds: consonants and vowels. But I promise, there’s more! One layer of additional structure in our speech is stress. As Mike Myers demonstrates in View From the Top (2003)—“You put the wrong em-pha-sis on the wrong sy-lla-ble!”—in English, one specific syllable in multisyllabic words is more prominent than the others. Stress is one part of prosody, which is a large umbrella of speech phenomena that take place in larger domains like syllables and phrases, instead of smaller pieces like consonants and vowels.

But the real fun (if you’re me) begins when you ask how we know a syllable is stressed in the first place. The best clue is how the word interacts with intonation, the part of prosody that investigates how languages use tonal melodies.

For example, let’s say you’re at work, and someone walks into the break room and utters one of the following:

1. “There’s coffee.”

2. “There’s coffee?”

Same consonants and vowels. Same context. The first is a statement informing that there’s coffee. The second is a question, possibly where someone is surprised to hear that there’s coffee. Aside from periods and question marks, purely the domain of writing, what exactly is the difference between the two?

The most common approach to modeling intonation is by using the building blocks H (high tone) and L (low tone). A rise can be described as LH, and a fall as HL. These and longer melodies are used for one of two purposes: 1) a ‘pitch accent’ which marks a stressed syllable; or 2) a ‘boundary tone’ which marks the edge of a phrase (like a comma might do in writing).

Read the whole thing. 

[haxyr3]

Look what I found! A wonderful video how to analyze vowels in Praat. It is in Russian and is about Russian vowels, of course, but in just 11 minutes this guy managed to explain:

- how vowel sounds are built in our articulation apparatus

- Vowel system in Russian in brief (worth 3 lectures in the university)

- How to use Praat to analyze the vowels

- interesting insights on what's going on with the Russian vowels.

WOW! He saved me hours of tutorials and reading!

[schwa-chsinn]