“This is our voice”
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This article belongs to the following series:
Audio Speed
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That was absolutely fascinating!!
Oh, happy to see that someone is poking around older calendars. There’s quite a lot to find :)
The site you linked is pretty interesting. They have a section on talking or singing through a straw to train your voice. It really seems to help you relax and talk without too much pressure. That’s helpful when you’re working on pronunciation because (at least for me) it’s like I try really hard to make the right sounds and get all tense, and that’s counter-productive.
Looks interesting, thanks for sharing that!
What does “change in volume-flow” mean? Is that just a different way of saying that the stream of air from your lungs makes the vocal cords (no “h”) vibrate and then you have a sound wave?
Volume flow is about how much air is passing through a cross section per second.
If you slowly exhale, you’ll have lower volume flow through you air pipe than if you breath after a sprint.
Change in volume flow is an increase or decrease of the amount of air that passes through a section per second.
And if that changes very quickly, that creates a sound.
So if you have a LOT of air flowing through something and then it suddenly cuts off, that’s create a sound and the same if there’s no air flowing and suddenly, it starts. That’s why explosions make a sound. The volume flow of air around the burst increases a LOT in a short time, and that’s what makes the sound.
Note that it’s NOT “high volume flow” that creates the sound. It’s the speed of change that creates it.
Do you know this popping sound you can make with your lips? Like a “p” but just the sudden opening without anything after it? That creates a “pop” and there is NOTHING clapping or vibrating. The sound is a result of virtually no volume flow of air and then suddenly, as the lips open, the compressed air rushes out, volume flow increases a LOT in a millisecond and THAT’S where the sound comes from.
Let me know if that makes sense :)
Yeah. I can feel a small burst of air on my hand when I do the popping thing, so I can see how that’s a smaller scale version of an explosion or something. Or just the idea that there’s a change in how much air flows through your vocal cords (or lips if you’re whistling) and that makes a sound. That makes sense.
I have a harder time imagining how it can make a sound when the air flow stops. Maybe it’s like when there’s a glottal stop at the end of a word. I do that sometimes with “yeah” and it does change the sound.
If the source of the sound is change of volume flow, then the main reason why the vocal bands are like bands is that the vibration they start doing is allowing for a super fast opening and closing of the throat and thus a super fast continuous change of volume flow. The sound that’s coming out there sounds like a series of such pops you do with your lips, but more like hundreds pers second.
Whistling is a different beast. There is NO change in volume flow, the flow stays constant. What’s happening there, is resonance. That’s why you have to shape everything a certain way.
As for air flow stopping… yeah, it’s not intuitive, but remember that the reason for the popping sound for instance is the CHANGE of air flow, not the fact that it’s flowing.
At it’s core, this sudden change in air flow means that air molecules are compressed in an area, enough to make that compression travel as a sound wave. When sound travels, no air is changing place, it just vibrates in place. If you compress it hard an sudden enough, this compression will travel as sound partitally.
And for that compression it doesn’t matter whether it’s an increase or decrease. Think of a traffic jam. One car stops and all of a sudden, all cars behind it “compress”. It’s hard to do a fast enough drop in volume flow with your mouth though.
Ohhh, OK. That makes sense.
So is it kind of like audio engineering, what you studied? Or did it also cover things like training your voice for talking to an audience?
No, mainly audio engineering, technical acoustics and some musicology. We did some things on perception and production of speech but more from a programming angle.
I did a major in linguistics some decades ago and learned a bit about this back then in a phonetics course. I have vague memories of looking at various sounds on an audio oscilliscope. However, the main focus of the course was learning about positions and types of articulation, so we could describe all the various sounds in different languages. We also made some attempts at recognizing and producing them, but obviously one would make limited progress in just one semester.
I had something VERY similar – the only class in my studies that relate to what I am doing now, aside from the coding stuff.
What I have found most helpful in working on my pronunciation is to have someone explain exactly the placement of tongue, mouth/lips shape, source and force of breath, etc. to help me more closely imitate what I hear. Right now, I am enamored of https://joycep.myweb.port.ac.uk/pronounce/ and fixated on “g”, “ng”, “gn”, “ngen” and “ungen” the latter three of which use the palate a bit like the ñ in piñon, but farther back as far as I can tell. Bedingungen…my tongue moves progressively rearward. But I obsess.
Wirklich faszinierend! Der Mensch kooptiert die Atemwege für die Sprache. Gedankenbeugung.
Was bedeutet speak to a tandem? Meinten Sie speak with a partner?
Yeah, I meant this language exchange tandem :)
Hallo lieber Emmanuel,
Was für ein zweiter Teil dieses Adventkalender ! Das habt mich auf jungen Alter , der Wellen Bewegung in Physik zurückgebracht .Das ist ein faszinierendes Thema der Physik seit 19. Jahrhundert, wo man fragte sich, was eigentlich eine Welle ist
Seitdem habt man viele Fortschrite gemacht , ins Besondere, in mechanische Wellen, wie wasserwellen, eleckriche und eleckro-magnetische Wellen.
Allerdings unsere Stimme durch die Teilchen( Molekule der Luft: O2,N2 ) wird übergetragen. Damit nehmen wir uns einander wahr .
Die Stimme , Laute, Konsonnante(Beilaute ) entstehen durch eine Wellenquelle, also unsere Lunge, die als ein Schwingender/ Vibrateur funktioniert .Die stimmbänder schwingen dann , die Stimme durch Mundraum ( Resonnanzraum, Klangkörper ) erzeugt wird .
Bis Morgen
This is great. I loved the addition/subtraction of the nasal cavity!
Colleagues of mine back in the 1990s could reproduce vocal sounds by modeling the (unmoving) vocal tract and calculating how air flows through it – so the volume/flow explanation is the correct one in my book.
So they had no real sound source but just varied the amount of air sent per second? I’m also team change of volume flow, but it’s the least intuitive for someone who has no background in acoustics.
Another great example for how change of volume flow creates noise are explosions and lightnening. The noise comes from a sudden intense change in flow, not from some material “bursting”.
The video you shared makes me think that the day is not far when they’ll make android robots with an authentic human speech
I think that’ll definitely come, but they won’t do the voice by modifying an artificial tube that way. They’ll do it with a transformer, like GPT. That’s much easier to implement and the results are already amazing. It’s only a bit too slow still. But building an artificial vocal trackt with muscles… we’re like 50 years away from that at least, in my opinion.
Hallo,
“are doing for this constant shaping the is INSANE” (surplus “the”)
Oh, and you don’t “make a master”, you DO a Masters in something, it’s one of those that can’t be explained because… English… German can’t hog all the weird unexplainable stuff ;)
Anyway, this is really interesting stuff and I actually never thought of my brain/muscles doing all this background work, there are all these videos out there of people showing tongue positions and making weird faces to pronounce the vowels… and we watch them and think “OMG, this is boring”, but I suppose we have to cut it some slack :)
Thanks and bis Morgen!
Well… ‘do/did’ are short cuts dare I say slang for ‘completed’ or ‘graduated with a’… but yes, I haven’t heard of making a master’s degree.
This is a real surprise to me because “make” is often use in a sense of “reaching, attaining”. Like… “making bank” or “making payroll”. But okay, there’s logic and then there’s what’s idiomatic :D
Yeah, I think Elsa is correct about this: “because….English”. You can ‘make the grade’, and you can ‘make a mess out of your studies’ and of course ‘make friends with your frat bros’ but English doesn’t use it when completing a degree in college/uni.
cool video!