LAB 2: Spectrographic and Spectrum Analysis of the English Vowel System

Labs: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17

The main purpose of this laboratory is to familiarize you with some speech analysis and editing tools.

• You will digitize some utterances recorded in Lab 1.
• You will use various analysis methods to examine the sounds.

Here are the resources that you will need:

Lab 2 Handout (PDF)

Utterances

You will need your database of recorded utterances from Lab 1. In this lab, you will use the following utterances from that database:

• The word 'shutter'.
• Some simple vowel pairs.

If you have not recorded an utterance database in Lab 1, you can download example recordings of the utterances needed for this lab.

The Tools

• record - the recording software (VAX)
• lspecto - used to make and print spectrograms (Vax or UNIX®)
• xkl - used for spectrum and waveform analysis (UNIX®/Linux®)

Reference Readings

Peterson, G. E., and H. L. Barney. "Control Methods Used in a Study of the Vowels." J Acoust Soc Am 24 (1952): 175-185. Also in R. Kent, et al. Papers in Speech Communication: Speech Production. Woodbury, NY: Acoustical Society of America, 1991, pp. 585-594.

Hillenbrand, J., et al. "Acoustic Characteristics of American English Vowels." J Acoust Soc Am 97 (1995): 3099-3111.

Stevens, K. N. Acoustic Phonetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 257-322. ISBN: 026219404X.