Fall semester 2002
Graduate School of Language Technology
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Each student should carry out an acoustic investigation of their own voice. This exercise will make the student familiar with speech analysis and the basic structure of speech sounds. The results should be summarised and discussed by all students.
The analysis can be done with the help of the WaveSurfer software. It can be downloaded from http://www.speech.kth.se/speech/speech_software.html .
Make an analysis of your own vowel system. Record the different vowels using test words within a carrier sentence such as: “I said testword again.”
Measure duration and formant frequencies for long and short vowels. Make a table with the measured values. Make a vowel chart using the first two formants plotting F1 on the x-axes and F2 on the y-axes. Compare the formant values for stressed and unstressed positions for all vowels.
Study the realisation of all consonants according to place and manner of articulation. Do this in the context of one vowel.
Study how one consonant varies in the context of several different vowels, different consonants and consonant clusters.
If the above is too simple for you, choose a specific question to study, such as the different realizations of /r/ or how the acoustic effects of rounding spread to adjacent segments in spontaneous speech.
Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics, Keith Johnson, ISBN# 0-631-20094-0