In this lab, we are going to explore vowel properties: intrinsic pitch and spectral make-up (formant structure).
Try to use a level (monotone) pitch throughout each of the vowels. (This will be easiest if you pause between vowels, rather than uttering the sequence of vowels as if it were part of a sentence.)
Take a quick look at your vowels in the View & Edit window,
and make sure you can clearly see the vowel formants (see Lab 1 on
formant display). If you have trouble seeing them, you can download the
file “Lab3_ EnglishVowels.wav” from eClass and take
your measurements on this file. If you do this, please make a note of it
on your report.
TIP:
The fundamental frequency value is always displayed on the right side of the window in dark red; formant frequencies are displayed on the left side in bright red – be careful not to get these two confused!If the blue pitch contour (blue line) doesn’t appear clearly, it is because Praat’s default pitch range is not appropriate for the file you’re listening to.
TIP:
If you are male, your pitch ought to be somewhere between 90 Hz and 150 Hz.If you are female, it should be somewhere between 150 Hz and 250 Hz.
If the pitch values that you are getting are outside of these ranges, Praat might be making a measurement error. You can confirm your pitch measurement by zooming in to a very small section of the waveform and manually measuring the duration of one glottal cycle. See Lab 4 for further details.
Also ensure that your ‘analysis method’ under Pitch settings is set to raw autocorrelation to get the correct display for the pitch contours.
Do note that the column chart can be made in other word processors such as Google Sheets and the free browser version of Excel. However, there is some difficulty with making the upcoming cluster chart in these programs. It would be easier to use the desktop version of Excel and follow the instructions below. As York students, you can easily access this version for free via MyApps which can be found here.
TIP: It is not always easy locating formants. Don’t get discouraged, just do the best you can!
TIP: It can be somewhat tricky to click precisely on the data label; try increasing the zoom level of the display to 150 or 200%.
Q1: In this lab, you should take all of your measurements in approximately the same spot: what spot is this and why?
Table 3.1 Intrinsic vowel pitches (F0)
Method | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Manual measurement |
Q2: Is pitch the same across all vowels? Do you notice any patterns with it? If so, what do you think the articulatory basis of these patterns might be?
Table 3.2 Vowel formants
Formant | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
F1 (Hz) | ||||||||
F2 (Hz) |
Q3: Look at the formant values associated with different vowels:
Q4: Does your vowel chart look as you expected
that it would, based on similar ones you may have encountered in your
previous courses/textbook(s)? Note anything that strikes you about your
vowel chart as being unusual, or different from your expectations.
Q5: Provide a reference and very brief summary of one academic paper that uses the methods covered in this lab.
Disclaimer: The original lab materials on which this lab is based was put together in 2015 (updated 2019) by Sonya Bird, Qian Wang, Sky Onosson, and Allison Benner for the LING 380 Acoustic Phonetics course at the University of Victoria. Their materials are released under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) which allows for non-commercial use as well as copying and distribution and the creation of derivative works for non-commercial purposes. Thomas Kettig (with assistance from Taylor Potter) has modified these materials as needed for the York University LING 4220 Acoustic Phonetics course.