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In the Spring of 2001, my
daughter, Tina, came to me with questions regarding her study of phonetics for her Masters in TESOL (Teachers of
English to Speakers of Other Languages).
She wanted to know exactly how various sounds are generated. She had learned that various sounds are produced by changing the position of the tongue, the lips, and the vocal chords but she wanted to know exactly how this created the various phonemes. We started by reviewing waves and then how sounds are affected by the sizes of containers. We visited the San Francisco Exploratorium and saw a nice model of the voice tract made from a duck pipe and pipes with different shapes. Blowing air through this contraption produced clearly discernable sounds of the vowels. |
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Vocal tract and pipe model for the vowel "e" |  |
Vocal tract and pipe model for the vowel "o" |
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I wrote a computer program to record sounds and
to analyze them with a Fast Fourier Transformation. The resulting time dependent spectra (frequency content) are displayed in a SONOGRAM.
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| Tina's Study
Object: "Using Sonograms to
Recognize Affect in Speech"
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Having plunged
headfirst into the world of phonemes, Tina returned to her Masters Program
with a completed research paper, “Using Sonograms to Recognize Affect in
Speech", to which her Professor responded with a “Unique
approach – Great Job”. Furthermore, Tina now uses this knowledge, in a very
simplified way, to explain to her many International students how to
properly pronounce words like “this” and “these”.
Emotion sad: low pitch, low volume |
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| sad joy | |||
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| Tina likes frogs. She has a huge collection of frogs: small and big ones, made of porcelain and plastic, mugs and caps. Missing was the sound! | I found a CD with the sounds of North American Frogs - 94 of them! | Ingrit prepared a special version of the cover of the frog CD | ||
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Here is the sonogram of the wake up call of "Frogus Ingolfus" |
