Back to home page
Back to "Occasional Papers"
Back to Contents

Figure 1 Spectrogram of the syllables /ba/, /da/ and /ga/, uttered by myself.

Figure 3 Hand-painted spectrograms of the syllables ba, da, ga.
The ba--da--ga pitch continuum of F2 is divided into 14 steps instead of three.
The two parallel regions of black indicate regions of energy concentration, F1 and F2.
Notice that the onset frequency of F2 of da is higher than that of ba;
and the onset frequency of F2 of ga is higher than that of da.

I wish to illustrate these two modes of listening through two series of sound stimuli from an unpublished demo tape by Terry Halwes. Listen to the series in figure 3, and see whether you hear the change from [ba] to [da], from [da] to [ga] occur suddenly.

Let us isolate the second formant transition, that piece of sound which differs across the series, and listen to just those sounds alone.

Listen to Peter Ladefoged producing an utterance in which there are no words, but in which the speaker sounds contented

Listen to Peter Ladefoged producing an utterance in which there are no words, but in which the speaker sounds upset or angry. Notice that it has slightly smaller peaks than in Figure 4, but they are sharper, without the rounded tops, and the "sentence" as a whole has an increasing pitch. The voice range is considerably lower, and the voice has a grating, harsh quality

Listen to Peter Ladefoged's producing the words heed, hid, head, had, hod, hawed, whispered

Listen to Peter Ladefoged producing the words had, head, hid, heed in a creaky voice




Notice in Figure 8 the first formant's descending pitch sequence, and the second formant's rising pitch sequence. The creaky-voice reading focuses attention on the descending first formant, the whispered reading on the rising second formant. Here the whispered sequence too goes down, because the same words occur in a reverse order. On comparing Figure 8 to Figure 7, the masking of the formants by the creaky noise becomes conspicuous.