Week 1: Initial Research on Phonetic Analysis (or, What the heck is a formant?)

Hello, all! This week marked the official beginning of my project and on-site placement. Things are off to a good start—Dr. Newman has been helpful in planning out the path ahead and meetings have been productive. So far, I’ve done some research into my course texts to nail down my methodology; I read Villareal’s “Gender separation and the speech community: Rhoticity in early 20th century Southland New Zealand English” from Language Variation and Change, and Turton and Lennon’s “An acoustic analysis of rhoticity in Lancashire, England” from the Journal of Phonetics. Each used a different method to measure rhoticity: Villareal used machine learning to categorize sounds while Turton and Lennon used programs to measure formants. Turton and Lennon’s paper will serve as a good model for my own research. Ultimately, Villareal’s turned out not to be as relevant to my project since its method preassumes that rhoticity is binary—I don’t. Even so, it’s still useful for the ideas it presents if not for methodology. 

By the way, for the majority of people who don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “formant”, a vowel sound is essentially made up of a few different pitches put together, where each pitch is called a formant. Different positions of the tongue in the mouth change how high each formant is, so the sound of a vowel is defined by the pitch of each formant and how they relate to each other. For example, here’s a graph of the vowel in “thirty”. 

Each colored line shows the path of one formant. The blue line on top moves down over time, showing the change from “i” to “r”. 

This is a good segue to what else I’ve been doing, learning about the programs I’ll be using to analyze these formants. Right now, these are Praat and FastTrack. Praat is a commonly used program used for speech analysis in phonetics, and FastTrack is used to track formants accurately. In fact, I used these two to generate that formant graph! This week I also began some online courses about research ethics on CITI’s (Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative) website. These courses are required for me to access the CoNYCE’s data. 

Looking forward, I’m planning to learn more about FastTrack and continue the research ethics courses. Once I complete them and get access to the CoNYCE sound files, I can look into processing them. I’ll also be reading Lipari’s “The Acoustics of Borrowed /ɚ/ in Quebec French” to look more into phonetics research.