Vowel Pitch Research Articles

Perception of Pitch and Duration Pattern of Vowel /a/: A Comparison across Age and Gender in 5 to 9 Years Old Children

Abstract Objectives The present study aimed to develop pitch pattern test (PPT) and duration pattern test (DPT) using vowel and investigate the temporal ordering skills among typically developing children aged 5 to 9 years across genders. The study compared the performance of children on these tests across different age groups and gender. The study also investigated the relationship between performance on the DPT and PPT tasks using the vowel /a/. Materials and Methods Two verbal stimuli tests, DPT and PPT, were developed. For DPT, the vowel /a/ was used at 246 Hz and had two different durations of 500 and 250 ms for long and short stimuli, respectively, with a 300-ms interstimulus interval. For PPT, the vowel /a/ was used at 220 Hz for “low” stimuli and 261 Hz for “high” stimuli, both lasting 500 ms, with a 300-ms interstimulus duration and a 6-second intersequence duration.A cross-sectional study design was utilized in the study. A total of 100 typically developing school children aged between 5 and 9 years were divided into five age groups, each consisting of 10 males and 10 females. All children passed a hearing screening at 25 dB HL from 250 Hz to 4,000 Hz and had an average or above-average academic performance as reported by their teacher. All the children were tested using the developed tests. The order of administration of DPT and PPT was randomized. Children were instructed to listen to the sequence of vowel presentations and hum them in the same order. Results There was no significant difference between scores of males and females across all the age groups. On both tests, there was a significant improvement in the performance of the children with increase in age. There was a strong overall correlation between scores of DPT and PPT. Conclusion Both DPT and PPT, utilizing vowels as stimuli, did not exhibit a ceiling effect. This study highlighted a robust correlation between the two tests.

Influence of vowels on note pitching in a cappella vocal quartet performance

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between the fundamental frequencies employed when singing different vowels on the same pitch for each member in turn of a professional soprano, alto, tenor, bass (SATB) a cappella vocal quartet in terms of the measured fundamental frequency during the production of a set of individual vowels within a four-part carrier phrase. This is an experimental singing production study on the tuning of vowels in the context of a cappella quartet singing. To facilitate this, one singer at a time in a professional a cappella vocal quartet changed the vowel they are singing on a single note concurrent with a consonant a cappella triad being sustained by the other three singers singing a fixed vowel. The first few bars of the a cappella anthem "If ye love me" by Thomas Tallis provided a carrier phrase that ended with a held chord on the chord on the word "me" by three singers against which the remaining singer produced a set of different vowels on their note of the chord. This is carried out for each of the four singers. The hypothesis being investigated is to remain accurately in-tune; fundamental frequency should be varied depending on the vowel being sung. Fundamental frequencies were measured using electrolaryngographs to ensure that there was no acoustic interference that could affect the accuracy of the fundamental frequency measurements if they were obtained from the audio output. The results provide clear evidence of changes being made to the fundamental frequencies of different vowels in an a cappella quartet context, and these changes confirm variations found elsewhere relating to the perceived pitches of different vowels. Measurable and consistent fundamental frequency variations occur when one part tunes different vowels against a reference chord sung by the other three singers in a choral quartet context on a fixed vowel. This has a direct consequence for tuning in a cappella choral music. The importance of carefully tuning individual notes for different vowels in a cappella choral singing requires focused listening to the pitches of the sounds being produced by the other singers in the choir. Usually, all parts are singing common vowels where it is important that the vowels are matched by being carefully blended together and tuning is aimed at being beat-free in just intonation. When compositions require parts to sing different vowels, both intrinsic (production related) and auditory (hearing related) pitch variations become relevant and challenge beat-free tuning.

Formant and Voice Source Characteristics of Vowels in Chinese National Singing and Bel Canto. A Pilot Study

There have been numerous reports on the acoustic characteristics of singers' vowel articulation and phonation, and these studies cover many phonetic dimensions, such as fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, formant frequency, and voice quality. Taking the three representative vowels (/a/, /i/, /u/) in Chinese National Singing and Bel Canto as the research object, the present study investigates the differences and associations in vowel articulation and phonation between Chinese National Singing and Bel Canto using acoustic measures, for example, F0, formant frequency, long-term average spectrum (LTAS). The relationship between F0 and formant indicates that F1 is proportional to F0, in which the female has a significant variation in vowel /a/. Compared with the male, the formant structure of the female singing voice differs significantly from that of the speech voice. Regarding the relationship between intensity and formant, LTAS shows that the Chinese National Singing tenor and Bel Canto baritone have the singer's formant cluster when singing vowels, while the two sopranos do not. The systematic changes of formant frequencies with voice source are observed. (i) F1 of the female vowel /a/ has undergone a significant tuning change in the register transition, reflecting the characteristics of singing genres. (ii) Female singers utilize the intrinsic pitch of vowels when adopting the register transition strategy. This finding can be assumed to facilitate understanding the theory of intrinsic vowel pitch and revise Sundberg's hypothesis that F1 rises with F0. A non-linear relationship exists between F1 and F0, which adds to the non-linear interaction of the formant and vocal source. (iii) The singer's formant is affected by voice classification, gender, and singing genres.

Intrinsic vowel pitch in Hamont Dutch: Evidence for If0 reduction in the lower pitch range

This study investigated Intrinsic Vowel Pitch (If0) in the Belgian Limburg dialect of Hamont. Its main aim was to investigate a potential correlation between If0 and f0, which has been attested in previous research, especially on contour tone languages. The Hamont dialect is particularly interesting because it has a pitch accent distinction, but also because the vowel system has a high and low vowel contrast in the front and the back dimension of the vowel space. The results of this study are generally compatible with If0 research on many languages but adds some new insights. Firstly, it was found that If0 in the Hamont dialect is comparatively large (1.97 semitones). Secondly, it was confirmed that the front–back distinction in vowel articulation has no significant effect on If0. Thirdly, when If0 is expressed on a semitone scale, no significant differences in If0 were found between male and female speakers of the dialect. The most important finding of the paper is the significant positive correlation between f0 and If0 in that If0 is smaller in the lower pitch range and bigger in the higher pitch range. This phenomenon in Hamont Dutch is much the same to what is observed in contour tone languages that have been examined for this. There are indications that a similar tendency exists in register tone languages and intonation languages. Although the cause of this progressive If0 reduction is not entirely clear, its wide distribution across prosodic systems seems to point towards a universal tendency.

Musical Aptitude and the Acquisition of Pitch and Duration in L2 Vowels

Music and language have been believed to be processed similarly in the brain. Studies have compared the processing of vowels and music, as they share spectral and temporal features such as pitch and timing. When comparing music and language skills the question arises whether music skills are inherent, measured with aptitude, or acquired, measured with experience. This article focused on musical aptitude studies. It was found that musical aptitude predicted non-native speech-sound processing better than musical experience. It is proposed that music and language skills are interconnected as greater overlaps in neural processing of music and speech were found for musicians than nonmusicians, and as individuals with no musical experience but with high L2 production skills were found to have high musical aptitude. Furthermore, spectral sensitivity was found to be the primary partial mediator of the link between musicality and non-native speech-sound processing, with temporal sensitivity having no role.

Prosodic variation in intelligible L2-accented speech: Using acoustic measures to predict listening effort

Despite the relative ease with which listeners understand spoken language in their daily lives, speech perception is a complex task that becomes challenging in certain conditions, such as listening to speech in an unfamiliar second language (L2) accent. In the current study, we use pupillometry data from McLaughlin and Van Engen (2020) to ask whether prosodic variation predicts listening effort for L2-accented speech. In that study, L1 speakers listened to L1- and L2-accented English sentences. The pupillary response was larger for the L2-accented speech, even though it was fully intelligible. We hypothesize that prosodic differences in L2- versus L1- accented speech may account for such differences in listening effort for fully intelligible speech. To test this, we apply four acoustic measures to each of the stimuli used in the experiment. The first two measures, wiggliness and spaciousness (Wehrle et al., 2018), quantify the number and degree of F0 contour changes across each trial. The remaining two measures are relative word duration (Baker et al., 2009) and vowel pitch (Li & Shuai, 2011). We will use these trial level measures as fixed effects in Growth Curve Models to test the extent to which prosodic deviation predicts pupillary responses.

Acoustic signatures of communicative dimensions in codified mother-infant interactions.

Nursery rhymes, lullabies, or traditional stories are pieces of oral tradition that constitute an integral part of communication between caregivers and preverbal infants. Caregivers use a distinct acoustic style when singing or narrating to their infants. Unlike spontaneous infant-directed (ID) interactions, codified interactions benefit from highly stable acoustics due to their repetitive character. The aim of the study was to determine whether specific combinations of acoustic traits (i.e., vowel pitch, duration, spectral structure, and their variability) form characteristic "signatures" of different communicative dimensions during codified interactions, such as vocalization type, interactive stimulation, and infant-directedness. Bayesian analysis, applied to over 14 000 vowels from codified live interactions between mothers and their 6-months-old infants, showed that a few acoustic traits prominently characterize arousing vs calm interactions and sung vs spoken interactions. While pitch and duration and their variation played a prominent role in constituting these signatures, more linguistic aspects such as vowel clarity showed small or no effects. Infant-directedness was identifiable in a larger set of acoustic cues than the other dimensions. These findings provide insights into the functions of acoustic variation of ID communication and into the potential role of codified interactions for infants' learning about communicative intent and expressive forms typical of language and music.

Child-directed Speech in a Norwegian Kindergarten Setting

ABSTRACT This paper presents a natural experiment using a play situation with specific toys to examine and compare the characteristics of 33 Norwegian-speaking female pedagogical employees’ child-directed speech (CDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS). Vowel pitch, duration, format frequency, and vowel space area of the vowels /a:/, /i:/, and /u:/ as well as their short counterparts /a/, /i/, and /u/ were analyzed. One-way repeated-measures ANOVAs show that the pedagogical employees spoke with a higher vowel pitch, had greater variation in their vowel pitch, and had smaller vowel space areas in CDS compared with ADS. In addition, the vowels in CDS were hypoarticulated compared with ADS. Therefore, the pedagogical employees enhanced CDS characteristics associated with attaining children’s attention and promoting social interaction between child and caregiver.

ИНТОНАЦИОННЫЕ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ РЕЧИ ДЕТЕЙ С УМСТВЕННОЙ ОТСТАЛОСТЬЮ

In the literature, data on the formation of intonation in Russian-speaking children with mild intellectual disabilities (mental retardation) without genetic syndromes and serious neurological disorders (for example, cerebral palsy) based on the instrumental analysis of children’s speech are absent. The aim of this study was to compare the intonation characteristics of speech in children, aged 5 to 7, with typical development and with mild intellectual disabilities. The participants of the study were 20 children aged 5 to 7: 10 children (5 girls and 5 boys) with typical development (TD group) and 10 children (6 boys and 4 girls) with mild intellectual disabilities (ID group, ICD-10-CM Code F70). Intellectual disabilities were not associated with genetic or severe neurological disorders (non-specific ID). Child speech was taken from the AD-CHILD.RU speech database. Audio and video recordings of speech and behavior of TD group children (in a kindergarten) and ID group children (in an orphanage) were made in the model situation of a “dialogue with an adult”. Two studies were conducted: a perceptual experiment (n=10 listeners – native speakers, researchers in the field of child speech development) and an instrumental spectrographic analysis of child speech. The instrumental analysis of speech was made in the Praat program. The duration of utterances and stressed vowels, pitch values (average, maximum and minimum), pitch range values of utterances, and pitch range values of vowels were analyzed. The perceptual experiment showed that the utterances of ID group children classified as less clear and more emotional than the utterances of TD group children. The task of phrase stress (words highlighted by voice) revealing was more difficult for adults when they were listening to the speech of ID group children vs. TD group children. In ID group children, the values of utterance duration are lower and the values of vowel duration are higher than in TD group children. The average, maximum, and minimum pitch values, the pitch range values of ID group children’s utterances are higher vs. the corresponding parameters of TD group children’s speech. The duration and pitch range values of stressed vowels from ID group children’s words highlighted by intonation are higher than these features of TD group children’s stressed vowels. The pitch contours of stressed vowels from TD group children’s words highlighted by intonation were presented in most cases by the rise of the pitch contour; the pitch contours of stressed vowels from ID group children’s words highlighted by intonation were presented by the fall of the pitch. The dome-shaped vowel pitch contour and U-shaped contour are more frequent in the speech of ID group children vs. TD group children. In the future, the intonation characteristics of speech of children with different diagnoses could be considered as additional diagnostic criteria of developmental disorders.

Does vowel recognition relate to pitch?

It was shown that, for vowel sounds, the spectrum relates to fundamental frequency (fo) and the spectral envelope is ambiguous, often representing two or three different vowel qualities if fo is varied substantially. Thus, from a speech perception perspective, vowel quality is indicated to relate to the pitch of a vowel sound. In this contribution, a concept is outlined addressing the experimental question of the relationship of vowel recognition and pitch. According to this concept, two or three harmonics are extracted near the spectral peaks of a natural vowel sound, representing assumed F1–F2 or F1–F2–F3, and the lowest harmonic(s) below the first spectral peak are added. Based on a single extracted harmonics pattern, a series of sounds are synthesised stepwise attenuating the levels of the lowest harmonics with the aim to effect a low-to-high transition of the highest common harmonics factor and pitch. Pitch level and vowel recognition of the sounds is then investigated by means of listening tests. Results of a first pilot study based on sounds of mid-closed vowels /e, ø, o/ confirmed the vowel–pitch relation hypothesis and also revealed cases of sounds with double-pitch and double-vowel recognition.

Речевое взаимодействие в триадах «мать—дизиготные близнецы» в 4—6-летнем возрасте детей

The longitudinal study of mother speech interaction with 4-6-years-old dizygotic twins (n=5 triads) was performed. The characteristics of maternal speech addressed to twins, characteristics of children’ speech development due to the order of the birth are investigated. The first-born child in pair have a higher level of speech development as compared to the second-born child by syntactic structure of sentences in dialogue, number of consonants, meanings of pitch in vowels. Correlation between characteristics of maternal speech and the level of twin’s speech development is revealed. When mothers interact with the second-born twins they stimulate them to communication more then the first-born twins.

Vowel content influences relative pitch perception in vocal melodies: A comparison of models based on brightness vs. intrinsic pitch of vowels

Past research involving real and synthesized instrumental timbres has found that note-to-note changes in brightness can influence perception of interval size. Changes that are congruent with changes in pitch led to an expansion, whereas changes that are incongruent lead to a contraction. In the case of singing, the brightness of individual notes (as measured by the spectral centroid) will vary as a function of vowel content. In a recent study, we investigated whether note-to-note changes in the brightness of sung notes were capable of influencing the perception of interval size. While results were consistent with past work on instrumental timbres, we were not able to completely rule out an alternative explanation concerning a perceptual correction for the intrinsic pitch of vowels (e.g., f0 of /i/ tends to be produced higher than /a/). In the present study, we created 288 unique note pairs that varied with regard to absolute change in f0 as well as vowel content. Vowels were sampled from across the vowel space, which allowed us to generate unique predictors for change in brightness (spectral centroid) and changes in intrinsic pitch (F2). Regression analyses will compare the effectiveness of competing models.

The effects of sound coder carrier rate and modulation bandwidth on voice pitch perception in cochlear implant users

We employed the dual filter-bank “STEP” coder to separately control the spectral and temporal modulation resolution of analysis channels. Previously we compared vowel pitch ranking and gender classification with eight subjects using enhanced modulation at F0—including across-channel synchronised modulation to the ACE coder. There was no significant improvement using modulation enhanced coding versus ACE across subjects. In a follow-up experiment we looked at the effect of stimulation rate on voice pitch perception. Since there are large inter-subject differences in overall temporal pitch acuity we hypothesised that some subjects’ performance may be more greatly influenced by carrier rate than others, or that some subjects may find sound quality satisfactory with lower carrier rates than those in their clinical processors. We used a version of STEP with a very short temporal envelope analysis window of 2 ms which allows a very low latency real-time processing implementation and large maximum modulation bandwidth. Subjects were tested using carrier rates of 1000, 500 and 250 pps/ch with modulation bandwidths controlled via low-pass filtering. Pilot data indicated that the new low-latency coder provides very good sound quality compared to ACE using 1000 pps/ch or 500 pps/ch. Also the modulation bandwidth could be tuned at different carrier rates to optimize voice pitch perception based on temporal cues. This opens the potential for lower stimulation rates to be used in CI coding while maintaining optimal temporal resolution.We employed the dual filter-bank “STEP” coder to separately control the spectral and temporal modulation resolution of analysis channels. Previously we compared vowel pitch ranking and gender classification with eight subjects using enhanced modulation at F0—including across-channel synchronised modulation to the ACE coder. There was no significant improvement using modulation enhanced coding versus ACE across subjects. In a follow-up experiment we looked at the effect of stimulation rate on voice pitch perception. Since there are large inter-subject differences in overall temporal pitch acuity we hypothesised that some subjects’ performance may be more greatly influenced by carrier rate than others, or that some subjects may find sound quality satisfactory with lower carrier rates than those in their clinical processors. We used a version of STEP with a very short temporal envelope analysis window of 2 ms which allows a very low latency real-time processing implementation and large maximum modulation ban...

I] is Lighter and More Greenish Than [o]: Intrinsic Association Between Vowel Sounds and Colors.

It has recently been reported in the synesthesia literature that graphemes sharing the same phonetic feature tend to induce similar synesthetic colors. In the present study, we investigated whether phonetic properties are associated with colors in a specific manner among the general population, even when other visual and linguistic features of graphemes are removed. To test this hypothesis, we presented vowel sounds synthesized by systematically manipulating the position of the tongue body's center. Participants were asked to choose a color after hearing each sound. Results from the main experiment showed that lightness and chromaticity of matched colors exhibited systematic variations along the two axes of the position of the tongue body's center. Some non-random associations between vowel sounds and colors remained effective with pitch and intensity of the sounds equalized in the control experiment, which suggests that other acoustic factors such as inherent pitch of vowels cannot solely account for the current results. Taken together, these results imply that the association between phonetic features and colors is not random, and this synesthesia-like association is shared by people in the general population.

What Vowels Can Tell Us about the Evolution of Music.

Whether music and language evolved independently of each other or whether both evolved from a common precursor remains a hotly debated topic. We here emphasize the role of vowels in the language-music relationship, arguing for a shared heritage of music and speech. Vowels play a decisive role in generating the sound or sonority of syllables, the main vehicles for transporting prosodic information in speech and singing. Timbre is, beyond question, the primary parameter that allows us to discriminate between different vowels, but vowels also have intrinsic pitch, intensity, and duration. There are striking correspondences between the number of vowels and the number of pitches in musical scales across cultures: an upper limit of roughly 12 elements, a lower limit of 2, and a frequency peak at 5–7 elements. Moreover, there is evidence for correspondences between vowels and scales even in specific cultures, e.g., cultures with three vowels tend to have tritonic scales. We report a match between vowel pitch and musical pitch in meaningless syllables of Alpine yodelers, and highlight the relevance of vocal timbre in the music of many non-Western cultures, in which vocal timbre/vowel timbre and musical melody are often intertwined. Studies showing the pivotal role of vowels and their musical qualities in the ontogeny of language and in infant directed speech, will be used as further arguments supporting the hypothesis that music and speech evolved from a common prosodic precursor, where the vowels exhibited both pitch and timbre variations.

The role of consonants in the perception of vocal attractiveness

Research on vocal attractiveness has identified several acoustic cues intrinsic to vowels (e.g., pitch) that affect judgements of attractiveness and have shown listeners generally agree in their ratings (e.g., Babel, McGuire, & King 2014). Research in this area has, however, been largely limited to an examination of vowels. The current study builds on past work by examining an array of acoustic cues intrinsic to consonants to ascertain how they affect judgements of vocal attractiveness. Two native speakers of Canadian English were recorded saying one-syllable words of the form sCVC or p/t/kVC. The acoustic cues of center of gravity and duration of /s/ and voice onset time of /p/, /t/, and /k/ were manipulated to both increase and decrease the value of each cue. Vowel pitch was also included in the analysis as a baseline for comparison with past research. Participants listened to the original and manipulated tokens and were asked to judge vocal attractiveness using a 7-point Likert scale. The data of 32 people (female, N = 16) aged 19-32 were analyzed, using mixed effects models. The most interesting finding of the current study was that while not all acoustic cues of consonants played a role in perceptions of vocal attractiveness, /s/ duration did, and for this cue both the speaker and listener sex were important to how the cue was perceived. This suggests that not only are male and female voices judged by different standards as to what is attractive, but that men and women are using different criteria when making these judgements.

An experimental investigation of acoustic task-based carryover effects

Carryover effects, where conditions in one experimental task affect behavior in subsequent tasks, have not received much attention in linguistics. This is worrying, given that linguistic elicitation tasks do affect talkers' production (Labov et al. 1972, Warner et al. 2012). This study used before and after within-subjects design. 16 talkers completed three tasks: a memory task, one of a set of intermediate tasks (passage reading, word reading or an interview), and a second memory task. Pitch, intensity and duration of stressed vowels were measured for productions from each task. Nested mixed linear effects models were constructed for each measure. In all models, acoustic measures were used as the response variable and subject and token as random intercepts. For data from the intermediate tasks, the inclusion of task identity significantly improved model fit for pitch (p < 0.05), intensity (p < 0.001) and duration (p < 0.001). In other words, there were very strong task effects. However, when comparing da...

Vocables and Microtones in Ancient Greek Music

This article discusses ways in which non-lexical utterances are linked in ancient Greek music to the representation of musical phrases. It first considers the possible use of ‘vocables’ in ancient Greek, i.e. vocal utterances lacking lexical content which may be substituted for the rhythms of a song for the purpose of the instruction or transmission of music. A system of vocables (distinct from solmization) outlined by Aristides Quintilianus is investigated to see if it can be shown to be related to principles of vowel pitch modification, whereby phonetically ‘high’ vowels tend to be enunciated at a higher pitch than ‘low’ ones. Since such variances could be heard in the context of microtonal music as creating wholly different musical notes, the Orestes papyrus is examined in detail to see if the enharmonic musical setting is affected in any way by principles of vowel pitch modification, with the conclusion that it is.

The effect of chiaroscuro and coup de glotte training on reducing the effects of intrinsic pitch in sung vowel transitions

Intrinsic pitch is an acoustic value that differs depending on vowel height. Sapir (1989) describes the various theories that provide an explanation for intrinsic pitch. Essentially, vowels which are produced higher in the filter (e.g., /i/ and /u/) tend to be pitched slightly higher than vowels produced at lower locations in the filter (e.g., /a/). The purpose of this study is to determine whether the chiaroscuro and coup de glotte vocal techniques used in the bel canto method of singing reduce the natural effects of intrinsic pitch of sung vowels by attempting to equalize both resonance and vibrational properties across the vowel spectrum. Six singers (2 sopranos, 2 tenors, and 2 basses) were recorded in this study. Participants sang a set of vowel transition exercises in a pre-training setting, then were trained in chiaroscuro and coup de glotte techniques, after which they did a post-training recording. Pitch, formant values, and amplitude (as mean values and at various times within each vowel) were e...

The influence of sung vowels on pitch perception

Phonologists have demonstrated that in speech there is an intrinsic pitch of vowels, i.e., that different pitch heights are perceived for different spoken vowels with the same mean fundamental frequency. Only limited work has been done on the impact of sung vowels on perceived pitch and previous studies, using forced choice paradigms, have found conflicting results comparing Front/Close to Back/Open vowels: Ternstrom, Sundberg, and Collden (1988), using manipulated sung tones, found that Front/Close vowels were perceived as higher than other vowels while Fowler and Brown (1997), using synthesized tones, found that Front/Close was perceived lower than Back/Open. The current study uses a method-of-adjustment paradigm to examine pitch perception of all four extremal vowels: Front/Close (/i/), Front/Open (/ae/), Back/Close (/u/), and Back/Open (/ɑ/), using completely controlled, but realistic synthesis. It also assesses whether different models of pitch perception are necessary for the various vowel types. In the experiment, the subjects are asked to match a reference tone that has no formants against a stimulus tone with first and second formants corresponding to a particular vowel. Both the reference and stimulus tones are identical in their synthesis except for the formants and are 300 ms in length.