#praat

This is an indispensable software in linguistics for spectral analysis of speech sounds.

I would pay you money if you could prove to me the icon art wasnt made in ms paint

A detailed discussion of pitch, intonation, and the role of technology in language description in Gizmodo. Excerpt: 

In school, we generally learn about two types of speech sounds: consonants and vowels. But I promise, there’s more! One layer of additional structure in our speech is stress. As Mike Myers demonstrates in View From the Top (2003)—“You put the wrong em-pha-sis on the wrong sy-lla-ble!”—in English, one specific syllable in multisyllabic words is more prominent than the others. Stress is one part of prosody, which is a large umbrella of speech phenomena that take place in larger domains like syllables and phrases, instead of smaller pieces like consonants and vowels.

But the real fun (if you’re me) begins when you ask how we know a syllable is stressed in the first place. The best clue is how the word interacts with intonation, the part of prosody that investigates how languages use tonal melodies.

For example, let’s say you’re at work, and someone walks into the break room and utters one of the following:

1. “There’s coffee.”

2. “There’s coffee?”

Same consonants and vowels. Same context. The first is a statement informing that there’s coffee. The second is a question, possibly where someone is surprised to hear that there’s coffee. Aside from periods and question marks, purely the domain of writing, what exactly is the difference between the two?

The most common approach to modeling intonation is by using the building blocks H (high tone) and L (low tone). A rise can be described as LH, and a fall as HL. These and longer melodies are used for one of two purposes: 1) a ‘pitch accent’ which marks a stressed syllable; or 2) a ‘boundary tone’ which marks the edge of a phrase (like a comma might do in writing).

Look what I found! A wonderful video how to analyze vowels in Praat. It is in Russian and is about Russian vowels, of course, but in just 11 minutes this guy managed to explain:

- how vowel sounds are built in our articulation apparatus

- Vowel system in Russian in brief (worth 3 lectures in the university)

- How to use Praat to analyze the vowels

- interesting insights on what's going on with the Russian vowels.