Solution to Last Month's Mystery Spectrogram

Solution for June 2006

labeled spectrogram
"Silly people walk too close."

I like this spectrogram because you have to separate your attention to the formant and the voicing bar. Just a hint.

Lower-Case S
[s], IPA 132
Well, this is a decent sibilant. It's got more resonance structure than I prefer, I don't know what was going on in my mouth that day. But the strongest bit of energy is wa-a-ay up off the top, which is a good cue for [s]. The amplitude (darkness) is consistent with sibilance, and the broad band (ignoring the resonant structure) is typiccal as well.

Small Capital I
[ɪ], IPA 319
This is so short, it probably should be treated as reduced, but you can sort of tell that it's the local pitch peak, which suggests that it's stressed. So whatever. The F1 is low of 'mid', the F2 is, well, moving. Part of the problem is that the following sound is throwing off the expected acoustics of this vowel. So whatever. Fill in the features later, I guess.

Tilde L (Dark L)
[ɫ], IPA 209
I've been doing a lot of these latetly. The overall amplitude here is slightly less than th e surrounding vowels, although not by much. The F1 fuzzes out a little. The F2 hits a minimum of about 1100 Hz at about 325 msec. F3 is raised to about 2800 Hz. Oooh. Raised F3 almost always means lateral. The lowish F2 is consistent with a) the dark /l/, and b) the surrounding front vowels.

Lower-Case I
[i], IPA 301
There are still transcription guides that insist that unstressed -y as in 'city' is always [ɪ]. It ain't. Transcribe what you hear, not what you have been told to transcribe. Okay, so this again is a relatively high vowel (F1 is lower than 500 Hz. Much lower, actually.), F2 is way high up above 2000 Hz. Can really only be [i].

Lower-case P + Right Superscript H
[p ʰ], IPA 101 + 404
So from 400 to 525 msec there's a pretty clear gap. Voiceless (no energy in the very low frequencies), and if you notice all the formants in the preceding vowel fall as you move toward the closure. Also, they all seem to rise out of it duirng the aspiration. So this is probably bilabial. The noise in the aspiration (from 525 to 600 msec or so) is tilted a little high, but the rising transitions really only say bilabial. That and the low-frequency noise (absent any noise above it until you get up to the F2 transition) is pretty bilabial looking as well.

Lower-Case I
[i], IPA 301
Well, we still have our low F1, in fact possibly the lowest of the entire spectrogram, F2 is close to 2400-2500 Hz, which is about as high as I've ever seen it. F3 is sort of pushed out of the way. So this has to be [i].

Lower-Case P
[p], IPA 101
Another gap. With falling transitions into it and for the most part rising transitions out of it. At least F3 and F4. Also you can sort of see a burst that is stronger in the low frequencies than the high frequencies. That's also a cue for bilabial, sometimes. No aspiration this time, tho.

Tilde L (Dark L) + Syllabicity Mark
[ɫ], IPA 209 + 431
Well, if this were a vowel, which is what it looks like, it would have a mid, or just low of mid, F1, a very low F2 (for my voice) around 1000 Hz, and an F3 way the heck above anything it should ever need to be. So if this were a vowel, it would have to be something middish and very back and/or round. Maybe [o]. But that wouldn't explain the high F3.... On the other hand, this is clearly the sonority peak of this syllable, so what are we going to do?

Lower Case W
[w], IPA 170
So from 900 msec for about 50 msec, we've got a seriously reduction in aperture, resulting in suppresion of acoustic energy. Actually, it starts earlier than that, but you can see it really kills the first and second formant in thi ssection. With a low F1/F2 like this, it really can only be either dark /l/ or /w/. Given that the 'peak' of the F3 movement looks like it's here rather than before, you might have found this string to be [pol] and not [plw], but then you would have been mistaken. One way or another. There's not a lot about this that looks particularly [w] like (relative to a dark /l/) except for its extremity of F1/F2 lowering.

Script A
[ɑ], IPA 305
It's always hard to decide what to do with moving formants, but here goes. I usually ignore the first and last fifth or so, so you're really only looking at the middle 2/3s or so of the vowel (do the math yourself, if you care). This allows you to ignore the obvious effect of very local transitions. With something like this, that doesn't quite do it, so we'll have to move on. F1 starts (absent the worst of the transition) in roughly id position, and rises to very high, up around 900 Hz. So this vowel mostly occupies the lower part of the vowel space. The low starting frequency is attributable to coarticulation with the preceding [w], so ignoring the last bit of the transition, the 'target' here seems to be around 800 Hz or so. The F2 again starts absurdly low due to coarticulation, but kind of levels out around 1000 Hz. So we've got something with a lowish quality, and very back and/or round. This being my voice there's only one vowel back there, really.

Lower-case K
[k], IPA 109
Well, we've got a gap, from just before 1100 to about 1150 msec, with some bursty releasey stuff following up to about 1200 msec. The transitions have a falling F3 but a a flattish F2 (and F4, if it comes to that). So the falling F3 might say bilabial, but then we'd expect to see more falling formants, especially in F1 and F2. So this is probably velar. There's no reason for a coronal plosive to have a falling F3 like that, and while not strictly 'pinch'y, it's as close as we're going to get. The strong noise in the F2 range is also consistent with velar release, although the higher frequency noise (in F4) is distracting, I admit.

Lower-case T + Right Superscript H
[tʰ], IPA 103 + 404
Now we immediately find another gap, with a long, aspirated release. The noise is vaguely [s] shaped, which is sort of the point. Again, there's a little more formant-shaping than I'd like but you get thiat in aspiration noise rather than clear sibilance. He says. At least the release noise is consistent with coronal transitions. Can't see the F2, but the F2 seems to start right about 1800 Hz, and the F3 is pretty flat and neutral.

Barred U
[ʉ], IPA 318
Ah, my favo(u)rite vowel. Sort of. Somebody asked on PHONET recently about the difference between barred-i and crossed-u. And I don't know what it is. This is actually my version of post-coronal /u/ (which has merged with post-coronal /ju/) into this thing with a frontish onglide, and a backish/roundish, but not amazingly back or round offglide. Nice, straight F2 transition. Anyway, I remember being careful to round this, so that's why I chose [ʉ] as opposed to anything else.

Lower-case K + Right Superscript H+ Tilde L (Dark L) + Under-ring
[kʰɫ̥], IPA 109 + 404 + 209 + 402
There was no way to segment this, so I just jammed the aspirated plosive and the voiceless approximant/fricative thing together. Sorry, but it's been a rough month. So we seem to sort of have some kind of gap. Somewhere. Followed by a long period of aspiration and voicelessness. The only clues to place here are the strong bit of noise in F2 in the release, which is typical of velars. Although again the [s] shape to the noise is distracting. The only clue to the lateral is the absurdly raised F3 (also the F4). Sorry.

Lower-case O
[n], IPA 307
So here againg we have an middish F1, a quite low F2 and a fairly high F3. The fundamentl is lower here, so the formants are all a little broader, but this looks a lot like the previous dark /l/. But of course it isn't. Not sure why the F3 is so consistenly high and flat here. Note how flat this is. Not really diphthongy at all, at least until you get to the last few pulses. There's no reason for the F2 to drop like that unless something was going on, but for the most part this vowel is pretty flat.

Lower-case S
[s], IPA 132
Now this is a decent looking [s]. It's length is attributable to final lengthening, and it's relative lack of amplitude is also consistent with being at the end of utterance. It's still pretty strong as fricatives go, tho. This is what I mean by one really wide band. THere's very little shaping to this at all, and the center frequency of this is somewhere off the top.