Maybe You're Curious...
Maybe you're curious about what it is that I actually do in school. And, if you asked me my answer would be is that I learn about awesome linguistic phenomena. My particular interests are in the direction of sounds and words (mostly, the lexicon.) Which means this week's lessons have been heavy on the physics. This means I get to look at awesome things like spectrograms and waveforms, like this one
That is a (super noisy) recording of me saying "Curiosities". Guess where I got that. I was trying to make a cleaner recording so that I could put up a spectrogram, but I had an issue with my microphone (which is annoying). Things that I've learned this week include that the fundamental frequency is the first harmonic and is controlled by the vocal cords. All of the other harmonics are integer multiples above that. These harmonics are then manipulated by the resonance properties of the vocal tract. Why is this important? Well, because of this manipulation we can look at things like waveforms and spectrograms and speculate about sounds in an educated way. For example, vowels have specific dark regions called formants. They indicate where the energy (because of the resonance properties) is more intense.
And, as fun and interesting as that sounds (and it is, at least to me) that isn't what I want to bring to your attention.
This is what I wanted to bring to your attention. Go have a listen. The pure (in a non-technical sense) tones, the whistling you hear about the humming in that recording are made by a human voice. It is called harmonic singing or throat singing. The singer manipulates their vocal tract so that all of the energy is focused on one (or two, I suppose) harmonics. So, if there were formants in the "vowel", now there aren't because everything has been pushed together. Isn't that cool?
