64: Making speech visible with spectrograms

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

If you hear someone saying /sss/ and /fff/, it’s hard to hear those as anything other than, well, S and F. This is very convenient for understanding language, but it’s less convenient for analyzing it -- if you’re trying to figure out exactly what makes two s-like sounds different, it would be helpful if you could kinda sorta turn the language processing part of your brain off for a sec and just process them as sounds. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about linguistic visualizations that let us examine sounds in more detail. One kind of visual is a wave form (which is found in many podcast apps!) and consists of longer lines for louder parts and shorter lines for quieter parts. Another kind of visual is a spectrogram, which shows a massive range of possible pitches and shades in which pitches have stuff going on during them at each time, sort of like a giant musical staff with thousands of potential notes. Spectrograms are especially popular in linguistics (there are even spectrogram reading competitions at conferences sometimes), although they’re also used for things like recording bird calls and making weird music videos, and there’s much-beloved free program called Praat which has been used to make them for over 30 years. If you don’t want to download a program, there are also free websites which let you speak into a live running spectrogram and see what it looks like, and we’ve produced a sample for you! We’ve created a dedicated video clip of the five minutes we spent using the real-time spectrogram maker, which you can watch here: https://youtu.be/ztctdMcK_1A Thanks to ScienceMusic.org for the handy real-time spectrogram maker, and go check it out yourself if you want to see what you sound like making various sounds. https://spectrogram.sciencemusic.org/ Announcements: LingComm Grants are back in 2022! These are small grants to help kickstart new projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences. There will be a $500 Project Grant, and ten Startup Grants of $100 each. Apply here by March 31, 2022 or forward this page to anyone you think might be interested, and if you’d like to help us offer more grants, you can support Lingthusiasm on Patreon or contribute directly. We started these grants because a small amount of seed money would have made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we want to help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world. https://lingcomm.org/grants/ If you want to help keep our ongoing lingthusiastic activities going, from the LingComm Grants to regular episodes to fun things like liveshows and Q&As, join us on Patreon! As a reward, you will get over 50 bonus episodes to listen to and access to our Discord server to chat with other language nerds. In this month's bonus episode we interview each other! We chat about what we were up to in 2021, what's coming in 2022, what we've been reading, our most mind blowing moments of linguistics undergrad, and more. Listen here! https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm For links to everything mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/673943123952549888/episode-64-making-speech-visible-with Transcript: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/673943123952549888/episode-64-making-speech-visible-with

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthesiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:21.9	I'm Gretchen McCallick.
0:23.2	And I'm Lauren Gorn, and today we're getting enthusiastic about ways of seeing sound waves.
0:28.3	But first, Lingcom grants are running again in 2022.
0:32.2	These are small grants designed to help people start new projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences.
0:38.4	So this year we have one $500 grant and $100 startup grants.
0:43.9	And we'll add additional grants if we end up with more patrons by the time the grant applications close.
0:49.3	We started the LNCOM grants because a small amount of seed money would have made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we wanted to help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world.
0:59.4	Information is on the Lingcom website. That's com with two M's. We'll put the link in our show notes and the grants close at the end of March 2022.
1:07.7	Also, our most recent bonus episode was an interview, chat about linguistics fiction we're reading, our favorite linguistics terminology, and what's ahead for Linkthusiasm in 2022. So you can listen to that and many, many more bonus episodes by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Linkthusiasm.
1:41.2	Learning about sounds in an interlinguistics class is kind of weird because we're already generally really good at processing sounds.
1:43.7	Like we're doing it right now.
1:45.3	And one of the things that you end up having to figure out how to do is how to unlearn
1:50.7	some of that automatic processing that you've been doing since you were a tiny kid
1:54.7	and relearn how to process it in a more sort of awkward way so that you can actually look at what's going
2:05.3	on there and not this very sophisticated object that your brain has made it into, which is language.
2:10.3	Framing it as a process of unlearning is a really nice way of putting it. I know some
2:14.9	proffs teach phonetics using sign language phonetics and hand shapes first,
2:19.7	because for non-signer, there's less for them to unlearn. But when it comes to learning speech
2:24.4	sounds, if you've grown up with a spoken language, it really is hard to actually pay attention
2:29.1	to what you're so used to attending to. Yeah, and it's often sort of hard to believe. Like, what do you mean
2:35.1	these two things that I think of as the same T sound are actually different T sounds? They seem
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