Biomaterial Database

Mistuning a harmonic of a vowel: grouping and phase effects on vowel quality. 1986

C J Darwin, and R B Gardner

The harmonic sieve has been proposed as a mechanism for excluding extraneous frequency components from the estimate of the pitch of a complex sound. The experiments reported here examine whether a harmonic sieve could also determine whether a particular harmonic contributes to the phonetic quality of a vowel. Mistuning a harmonic in the first formant region of vowels from an /I/-/e/ continuum gave shifts in the phoneme boundary that could be explained by (i) phase effects for small amounts of mistuning and (ii) a harmonic sievelike grouping mechanism for larger amounts of mistuning. Similar grouping criteria to those suggested for pitch may operate for the determination of first formant frequency in voiced speech.

UI	MeSH Term	Description	Entries
D010700	Phonetics	The science or study of speech sounds and their production, transmission, and reception, and their analysis, classification, and transcription. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed)	Speech Sounds,Sound, Speech,Sounds, Speech,Speech Sound
D010898	Pitch Perception	A dimension of auditory sensation varying with cycles per second of the sound stimulus.	Perception, Pitch,Perceptions, Pitch,Pitch Perceptions
D011571	Psychoacoustics	The science pertaining to the interrelationship of psychologic phenomena and the individual's response to the physical properties of sound.	Psychoacoustic
D006801	Humans	Members of the species Homo sapiens.	Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D013067	Speech Perception	The process whereby an utterance is decoded into a representation in terms of linguistic units (sequences of phonetic segments which combine to form lexical and grammatical morphemes).	Speech Discrimination,Discrimination, Speech,Perception, Speech