#spectrograms

this above example is some 40-60 seconds around the breakdown in Child of the Desert. colorwise: Colin guitar in red, Nick bass in green, and Brendan guitar in blue. you can see nick’s got a bass slide in the middle but otherwise it’s kinda remarkably The Same looking here … maybe not the greatest example but check out the bass slide. then listen to child of the desert and listen for the bass slide in the breakdown (like 20 seconds into it?)

we creep in on extinction / i pull your arms right in / i weep and say goodnight love / while my organs pack it in

Lingthusiasm Episode 64: Making speech visible with spectrograms

If you hear someone saying /sss/ and /fff/, it’s hard to hear those as anything other than, well, S and F. This is very convenient for understanding language, but it’s less convenient for analyzing it -- if you’re trying to figure out exactly what makes two s-like sounds different, it would be helpful if you could kinda sorta turn the language processing part of your brain off for a sec and just process them as sounds.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about linguistic visualizations that let us examine sounds in more detail. One kind of visual is a wave form (which is found in many podcast apps!) and consists of longer lines for louder parts and shorter lines for quieter parts. Another kind of visual is a spectrogram, which shows a massive range of possible pitches and shades in which pitches have stuff going on during them at each time, sort of like a giant musical staff with thousands of potential notes. Spectrograms are especially popular in linguistics (there are even spectrogram reading competitions at conferences sometimes), although they’re also used for things like recording bird calls and making weird music videos, and there’s much-beloved free program called Praat which has been used to make them for over 30 years. If you don’t want to download a program, there are also free websites which let you speak into a live running spectrogram and see what it looks like, and we’ve produced a sample for you!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Spectrogram demo video

We’ve created a dedicated video clip of the five minutes we spent using the real-time spectrogram maker, which you can watch here: https://youtu.be/ztctdMcK_1A

Thanks to Academo.org for the handy real-time spectrogram maker, and go check it out yourself if you want to see what you sound like making various sounds.

Announcements:

LingComm Grants are back in 2022! These are small grants to help kickstart new projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences. There will be a $500 Project Grant, and ten Startup Grants of $100 each. Apply here by March 31, 2022 or forward this page to anyone you think might be interested, and if you’d like to help us offer more grants, you can support Lingthusiasm on Patreon or contribute directly. We started these grants because a small amount of seed money would have made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we want to help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world. If you want to help keep our ongoing lingthusiastic activities going, from the LingComm Grants to regular episodes to fun things like liveshows and Q&As, join us on Patreon! As a reward, you will get over 50 bonus episodes to listen to and access to our Discord server to chat with other language nerds. In this month's bonus episode we interview each other! We chat about what we were up to in 2021, what's coming in 2022, what we've been reading, our most mind blowing moments of linguistics undergrad, and more. Listen here! Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Lingthusiasm Episode: All the sounds in all the languages - the International Phonetic Alphabet

Lingthusiasm Episode: Vowel Gymnastics

Wikipedia entry for Spectrograms

Wikipedia entry for Praat

Praat in action via DaoWaves on YouTube

All Things Linguistics post on creating spectrograms in Praat: The briefest possible intro with hands-on activity

A Brief History of Spectrograms by Earbirding

Real time Spectrogram

Real time Spectrogram with sample files

Auditory Illusions: Hearing Lyrics Where There Are None via MonotoneTim on Youtube

Secret images viewable in a Spectrogram of Aphex Twin's music via Bastwood

Wikipedia entry for Aphex Twin's images and pseudonyms

Video of Aphex Twin's #2 (the long formula) on Window-licker 2001, showing the Spectrogram image

Full YouTube video of this episode, which includes the 5 minute spectrogram clip

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Creating spectrograms in PRAAT: The briefest possible intro with a hands-on activity 

A helpful set of open-access slides from SJ Styles for learning the basics of acoustic phonetics. Description: 

A spectrogram is a way of visualizing the energy carried by sound. It allows us to see the energy in air molecules vibrating at different frequencies. Spectrograms look very complicated, and extremely science-y, but they’re really not too tricky, once you understand a little bit about how they work. They are very easy to produce using simple free tools. These few slides will show you how to create a spectrogram from the speech of your own voice, using a regular laptop or computer, and how to use spectrograms to explore some of the properties of your own voice. Assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics, phonetics or acoustics.