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Collection of Samples

Module by: Andrea Trevino

Summary: 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.
stella.bmp
Figure 1
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
spoons.bmp
Figure 2: 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.

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