Spectograms

Hi!

Sorry about the delay, I know that it's been a while since the last time I posted here, but I had some issues with Blogger, our blog server. Luckily, things are working well now so let's get back to Brazilian accent!

Good news: meanwhile, we have started working with Praat on class. Praat is a software through which it is possible to analyze physical qualities of our voice (since sound is a mechanical wave!). It's a very interesting tool. Even though I (still) can't handle it very well, I really like the program. The idea of using a software and analyzing accent-related differences through physics concepts is very clever.

To warm up, we were asked to record ourselves saying "The butter spilled on the cot" naturally, and then trying to imitate a different accent. As I could not really do a good imitation, I decided to ask one of my roommates, Nathan, and one dormmate, Evelyn, to say the same sentence so that I recorded not only myself but also both of them. For each record, Praat provided the following spectrograms:

Evelyn's record (Evelyn is from Washington, DC)

Nathan's record (Nathan is from Mississipi)

My own record (As you all know, I'm from Brazil!)

By comparing the spectograms, I have the impression that my spectogram is more similar to Evelyn's one than to Nathan's one, probably because, to an American, I probably sound more like a midlander than like a southern English speaker. (It's interesting that this is the same conclusion of the quiz, as described in my first post).

For instance, it's possible to see that dark areas vary from each spectogram. If we notice that the spectograms are divided into "columns" (the gaps, I believe, represents the pauses between sounds) , we can conclude that, in what we'll call the "third column", Nathan's sound has a different feature. The "higher" area of this "column" is not so dark as in the other two spectograms. As there's a relation between darkness and energy, intensity, I'd say that he spends less energy when pronouncing the end of the word "butter", when compared to the energy that Evelyn and I spend.

For now, I'm not so comfortable to Praat as to come to better conclusions about these sounds, but hopefully this comfort is coming soon. This software is certainly an amazing tool for studying sounds' characteristics.

Best,

Nikolas

Articles

The 4 articles from the website of American Dialect Links that I read are:

"Canadian" raising in the Northern Midwest (http://babel.ling.upenn.edu/~nagy/nwav/WWWabs/Dailey.html)

Chicago Vocabulary (http://members.aol.com/mistamoose/vocab.html)

Alaskan slang words (http://www.decorphoto.com/ak-slang.htm)

Learn How to Talk Like a Trinidadian (http://www.usm.maine.edu/~amoroso/Timothy/TriniTalk.html)


The problem was that many links in the website are disconnected, so I wasn't able to read some articles that seem to be interesting (such as "How to Talk Like a California Dude" and "CANADA - Speaking Canadian"). Among the ones that I read, "Alaskan slang words" was my favorite. It's really curious how Alaskans refer to other American states as "Lower 48" , how they call a cold night a "three-dog night" (because two dogs are not enough to warm you up enough!) and how they describe the only two season they have throughout the year (winter and road construction season). In a well-humored way, the authors describe some traditions and curiosities about the state of Alaska and make their reader learn a little more about their state's particularities. I think that "Chicago Vocabulary", an article with the same purpose of describing a place through local slang, is not so efficient in its purpose, mainly because the text is too long and there are many references that only local citizens can understand (such as Resurrection Mary, "A legendary ghost that has been known to hitch rides with men, get out of the car, and run into the cemetery" or Reversibles, "Express lanes on the Kennedy, which reverse direction depending upon the time of day"). To be honest, I did not understand the point of "'Canadian' raising in the Northern Midwest" simply because I'm not sure of what a "raising" is. Finally, "Learn how to talk like a Trinidadian" is interesting because it describes the diversity of languages that took part in building the Trinidadian dialect. I found it particularly interesting that, in Trinidad and Tobago, "college" stands for secondary school. That's because in Brazil a similar word, "colégio", is also used to refer generally to second school. Due to this similarity, some Brazilian students who are beginning to learn English sometimes misinterpret "college" as "colégio" when "universidade" would be the best translation. Nevertheless, the article that I liked most is "Alaskan slang words".