Collection of Samples 1.3 2005/12/14 21:03:22 US/Central 2005/12/14 23:57:41.539 US/Central Andrea Trevino andreat@rice.edu Andrea Trevino andreat@rice.edu diphthong extract sample vowel 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 thorough representative sample of each individual’s accent. With the inclusion of the two diphthongs that we also extracted, we took 14 vowel samples per person. We used the following paragraph in each recording; there are at least 4 instances of each vowel sound located 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 cleanest formants for the whole paragraph. For example, the ‘oo’ in ‘spoons’ was chosen due to the ‘p’ that precedes the vowel. The ‘p’ sound creates 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 values move 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 diphthongs being much longer to capture the entire sample transition.