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How we chose what vocal samples to extract in order to get an accurate representation of an accent.

Choosing the sample set

We decided that one sample for each of the English vowels on the IPA chart would be a fairly thoroughrepresentative sample of each individual’s accent. With the inclusion of the two diphthongs that we also extracted, we took 14vowel samples per person. We used the following paragraph in each recording; there are at least 4 instances of each vowel soundlocated throughout it.

Phonetic background

(Please i, call a, Ste-ε, -lla ə, Ask æ, spoons u , five ai, brother ə^, Bob α, Big I, toy oi, frog ν, go o,station e)

The vowels in bold are the ones we decided to extract; we determined that these would provide the cleanestformants for the whole paragraph. For example, the ‘oo’ in ‘spoons’ was chosen due to the ‘p’ that precedes the vowel. The ‘p’ soundcreates a stop of air, almost like a vocal ‘clear’. A ‘t’ will also do this, which explains our choice of the ‘a’ in ‘station’.

Spoons

The stop made by the 'p' is visible as a lack of formants

The two diphthongs present are the ‘ai’ from ‘five’ and ‘oi’ from ‘toy’. In these samples, the formant valuesmove smoothly from the first vowel representation to the second.

The vowel samples that we cut out of the main paragraph ended up being about 0.04 seconds each with diphthongsbeing much longer to capture the entire sample transition.

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Source:  OpenStax, Elec 301 projects fall 2005. OpenStax CNX. Sep 25, 2007 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10380/1.3
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