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