Vowel sounds

Some ancient Jewish recipes for creating a golem required a person to combine each letter of the Hebrew alphabet with each letter from the Tetragrammaton (YHVH), and pronounce each of the resulting letter pairs with every possible vowel sound. The Tetragrammaton serves as an activation word to pierce reality and energize the being. 

What we really are is a web of interconnections, the summation of all of our relationships, all the people we know and those we are still to meet. It s not that we are in the web, the web is what we are. Vowel sounds change the colors pitch and tone alter the shape of the enclosing... 

Niemi M, Laaksonen JP, Vahatalo K, Tuomainen J, Aaltonen O, Happonen RP. Effects of transitory lingual nerve impairment on speech an acoustic study of vowel sounds. J Oral Maxillofac Surg 2002 60(6) 647-52. 

Assonance repetition of vowel sounds ( child bride of time ) to link and underscore a relationship among the words ... 

Diphthongs A vowel sound produced when the tongue glides from one vowel to another such as in bee, bay, toy, buy. 

Another important set of periodic sounds that have harmonic spectra are the voiced sounds of speech. Figure 6.2 shows the spectrum of the voiced vowel sound ahh (as in father), and Figure 6.3 shows the spectrum of the voiced vowel sound eee (as in beet). 

All vowel sounds are voiced and hence have the same sound source (the glottis). What distinguishes one vowel sound from another is the shape of the oral cavity and to a lesser extent the shape of the lips and duration with which the sound is spoken. The oral cavity and lips operate to create different shaped cavities through which the source sound must pass. By moving the jaw, lips and tongue, different filter effects can be created, which serve to modify the harmonics of the glottal sound source and produce the wide variety of vowel sounds. It is important to note that... 

Vowel sounds are described with the primary dimensions of high/low and front/back, and secondary dimensions of rounding and length. 

The resonances of the vocal tract are called formants, and these are thought to be the primary means by which listeners differentiate between different vowel sounds. 

The configuration of the vocal tract governs which vowel sound is produced, and by studying this we can again an understanding of how the physical properties of air movement relate to the transfer function, and sounds produced. In a similar fashion, transfer functions can be determined for the various types of consonants. To determine the form these transfer functions take, we have to investigate the physics of sound, and this is dealt with next. 

When the velum is lowered during the production of nasals and nasalised vowels, sound enters via the velar gap, propagates through the nasal cavity and radiates through the nose. Hence for a more complete model, we have to add a component for the nasal cavity. This in itself is relatively straightforward to model for a start, it is a static articulator, so doesn t have anywhere near the complexity of shapes that occur in the oral cavity. By much the same techniques we employed above, we can construct an all-pole transfer function for the nasal cavity. 

Further refinement can be achieved by the use of zeros. These can be used to create antiresonances, corresponding to a notch in the frequency response. Here the format synthesis model again deviates from the all-pole tube model, but recall that we only adopted the all-pole model to make the derivation of the tube model easier. While the all-pole model has been shown to be perfectly adequate for vowel sounds, the quality of nasal and fricative sounds can be improved by the use of some additional zeros. In particular, it has be shown [254] that the use of a single zero anti-resonator in series with a the normal resonators can produce realistic nasal sounds. 

In languages such as English, there is a particular vowel sound known as schwa. This is often called the neutral vowel in that its position is neither front nor back, high nor low, rounded nor unrounded. It is the first vowel in about, Seville, collect, and the second vowel in sarah, currency, and data. Most other sounds are simply called by how they sound schwa is given its special name because it is difficult to pronounce in... 

In the early days of speech research, formants held the centre stage as the representation for speech. Today, however, it is extremely rare to find formants used in speech recognition, synthesis or other systems. This is partly because robust formant trackers have always proved hard to develop, so researchers moved towards cepstra and LP representations that could be robustly found from speech, even if their form didn t exphcitly show the type of information that was thought most important. Furthermore, formants are really only a powerful representation for vowel sounds they are not particularly... 

The onset of permanent deafness may be sudden, as with very loud explosive noises, or it may be gradual. A gradual onset of deafness is more usual in industry and may be imperceptible until familiar sounds are lost, or there is difficulty in comprehending speech. The consonants of speech are the first to be missed f, p, t, s and k. These are of high frequency compared with the vowel sounds, which are of low frequency. Speech can still be heard, but without the consonants it is unintelligible. There is a risk too that a person exposed to excessive noise may believe himself to be adjusting to it when, in fact, partial deafness has already developed. 

The simple sine waves used for illustration reveal their periodicity very clearly. Normal sounds, however, are much more complex, being combinations of several such pure tones of different frequencies and perhaps additional transient sound components that punctuate the more sustained elements. For example, speech is a mixture of approximately periodic vowel sounds and staccato consonant sounds. Complex sounds can also be periodic the repeated wave pattern is just more intricate, as is shown in Fig. 1.105(a). The period identified as Ti appHes to the fundamental frequency of the sound wave, the component that normally is related to the characteristic pitch of the sound. Higher-frequency components of the complex wave are also periodic, but because they are typically lower in amplitude, that aspect tends to be disguised in the summation of several such components of different frequency. If, however, the sound wave were analyzed, or broken down into its constituent parts, a different picture emerges Fig. 1.105(b), (c), and (d). In this example, the analysis shows that the components are all harmonics, or whole-number multiples, of the fundamental frequency the higher-frequency components all have multiples of entire cycles within the period of the fundamental. 

Martland, P., Whiteside, S.P., Beet, S. W., and Baghai-Ravary, L. (1996) Analysis of ten vowel sound across gender and regional / cultural accent. Spoken language conference 4 2231-2234. 

In this study, the vowel samples data were collected from Malay children between 7 to 12 years old. The sampling rate was set at 20 kHz which fulfilled the minimum requirements as suggested by previous studies [15]. Goldwave was used to collect and store the sound samples. The sustained vowel sounds were recorded from a total of 180 male children and 180 female children. The speech recording was done in quiet room. The subjects were asked to sit with body upright and mouth facing the microphone. Each of the Malay vowels was sustained for more than 5 seconds. 

Vocal Joystick (VJ) [10] is based on the assignment of different vowel sounds ( aah , eeh , etc.) to four or eight basic directions. The movement continues for as long as the sound is being produced. The loudness governs the speed of motion. 

The Vocal Joystick System. The Vocal Joystick (VJ) system [10] offers as one of its modes a cursor control mode that allows a user to move the mouse pointer by making vowel sounds that have been assigned to each direction. Figure 1 shows the mapping of the vowel sounds to the directions for the 4-way version of VJ, which was the version that was used in our experiment. An 8-way version is also available. A more detailed technical description of the VJ system can be found in [4]. 

VJ can be used without any user specific training, but its performance can be improved by adapting the system to each user s vocal characteristics. This process involves the user vocalizing each of the vowel sounds for two seconds at their normal loudness, and the actual adaptation step takes less than a second. 

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