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Vowel Quality and Singing Style

Anonymous — Wed, 09 May 2018 00:00:23 +0000

Vowel Quality and Singing Style Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/08/2018 - 18:00

Have you ever listened to a musician singing and then been surprised by their accent when they speak? Or heard someone talk and then been mystified by how differently they sing?

By Jonathan Lilley
Course: Language Sound Structures (Ling 3100)
Advisor: Prof. Rebecca Scarborough
LURA 2018

I have never heard The Beatles speaking and I would have never known they were British until someone told me. I’ve also heard some American singers sing with a British accent. But there surely must be some effect of one’s speech and accent on singing style — right? That is exactly what this paper set out to discover (but on a small scale).

The focus of this paper is to see how the Southern Californian vowel shift affects vowels in singing, specifically church choir/classical style of singing. For those who do not know, the Southern Californian vowel shift is a vowel shift in which [u] and [o] are fronted, or pushed forwards, producing [ʉ] or [y] (for [u] ) or [ɵ] or [ø] (for [o]). For this paper, I collected three pairs of sound files of people raised in Southern California and trained in this church choir/classical singing style. Each pair was a person speaking and then singing a short passage that contained several instances of [u] and [o]. (The passage was “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.) I then used Praat to record the first and second formants of each instance of [u] and [o] in the sound file, and then I compared each instance of [u] and [o] in each speaking sound file to its respective singing sound file. Since formants are proportional to backness and height of vowels, these comparisons illustrated any differences that existed in vowel frontness.

In this data, there was a variety of results. One of the singers’ vowels changed greatly, one changed little, and one changed somewhat (but not strongly either way). The first table, Speaker 1, shows a subject with great change in fronting between singing and speaking, as seen with the comparisons of the F2 values when compared between singing and speaking. The spoken vowels were fronted, as expected in Californian English, while the sung vowels were not.

Speaker 2, however, had very little difference between singing and speaking F2 values.

Why was there such variation? It could be the singers’ teachers, where in Southern California they came from, their age, or any number of other factors. Perhaps with more subjects I would have gotten more consistent results and larger trends. It is also possible that other singing styles are affected differently. Perhaps a vowel shift would affect pop singing styles more.

This study began to discover how the Southern Californian Vowel shift affects church choir/classical singing styles. Perhaps a future study will solve this mystery.

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Does Our Perspective on Time Influence the Memories we Recall?

Anonymous — Tue, 08 May 2018 23:59:50 +0000

Does Our Perspective on Time Influence the Memories we Recall? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/08/2018 - 17:59

English speakers take two perspectives on time, which are reflected in how we talk about time.

By Jayne Williamson-Lee
Course: FROP Independent Study
Advisor: Prof. Bhuvana Narasimhan
LURA 2018

1. The Ego-Moving Perspective: People think about themselves moving forward in time toward events in the future. We talk about events like we are approaching them and might say, “We are approaching the deadline.”

2: The Time-Moving Perspective: People can also think of themselves as being stationary in the present while events in time move toward them from the future. We talk about events like they are approaching us and might say, “The deadline is approaching.”

Images courtesy of Boroditsky (2000)

Consider this statement: Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days.

Which day is the meeting now that it has been rescheduled?

(Image courtesy of Internet Memes)

It’s a bit of a trick question since you can answer Monday or Friday.

Answering 'Monday' suggests that you are conceptualizing the meeting moving from Wednesday closer to you in the present moment. ('time-moving perspective')

Answering 'Friday' suggests that you are conceptualizing yourself moving toward the meeting now further in the future. ('ego-moving perspective')

Have you ever thought about how our emotional experiences might affect our view of time?

Two researchers, Lee and Ji (2013), wondered about this and conducted a study to see how people’s emotional experiences affect their time perspective. They asked participants to recall positive and negative memories and then asked them the ambiguous time question shown above.

They found that people who recalled pleasant memories were more likely to take the ego-moving perspective. Conversely, people who recalled unpleasant memories were more likely to take the time-moving perspective. They propose that this is because people prefer to move toward positive stimuli and away from negative stimuli, which also applies to events in time.

This showed that people change their time perspective depending on whether they perceive an event to be pleasant (positive) or unpleasant (negative).

Other studies have also found a similar effect of positive events being associated with the ego-moving perspective and negative events with the time-moving perspective.

These studies suggest that our emotional experiences affect our view of time.

Can our view of time influence our emotional experiences?

I wanted to know whether there was a reverse effect – can our view of time also affect our emotional experiences?

One study by Ruscher (2011) looked at how people’s perspective on time influenced their predictions of how others would feel about an anticipated future emotional experience. Participants in this study were primed to adopt the ego-moving or time-moving perspective, then read a story about a woman whose son had died. They were asked to estimate for how much time she would grieve after her son’s death.

Ruscher found that participants who took the ego-moving perspective expected her grieving period to be shorter, at about 5 months, in comparison to participants who took the time-moving perspective, who expected her grieving period to continue past 10 months.

She proposes that the ego-moving perspective encouraged participants to conceptualize the woman actively moving forward in time, past her grief, and resuming her daily routine. In contrast, the time-moving perspective encouraged participants to think that her grief followed her as she moved passively into the future (constituting a longer grieving period). This study demonstrates that the two time perspectives are associated with active and passive movement through time, which influence how we perceive anticipated (future) emotional experiences.

However, there were no studies that addressed whether our view of time affects how we perceive our past emotional experiences, so I decided to research it. In my study, I looked at how the two time perspectives affect whether we recall positive or negative memories.

I predicted that people who take the ego-moving perspective would likely recall more positive memories. On the other hand, people who take the time-moving perspective would likely recall more negative memories.

In this study, participants first read sentences depicting events moving through time (space-time metaphors). These sentences were encoded in the ego-moving or time-moving perspective in order to prompt people to think of time in a certain perspective. They then wrote about autobiographical memories. After, they rated whether their memory was positive or negative.

I found no evidence to suggest a difference in the retrieval of positive and negative memories based on whether participants were exposed to ego-moving or time-moving sentences.

Although previous studies have demonstrated that our emotional experiences influence our perspective on time, this study does not provide evidence to suggest there is a reverse effect. It is possible that methodological improvements to the study may yield effects of time perspectives on memory valence. However, it may be that it is more difficult to find effects in this direction because of the complexity of our lived experiences. Further efforts are needed to understand other factors that may influence our emotional experiences and their interaction with time perspectives.

References

Boroditsky, L. (2000). Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75: 1–28.

Lee, Albert, and Li-Jun Ji. (2013). "Moving Away from a Bad Past and toward a Good Future: Feelings Influence the Metaphorical Understanding of Time." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(1): 21-26.

Ruscher, Janet B. (2011). "Moving Forward." Social Psychology 42(3): 225-30.

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Nasalization of Vowels in French Second Language English

Anonymous — Tue, 08 May 2018 23:01:18 +0000

Nasalization of Vowels in French Second Language English Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/08/2018 - 17:01

French speakers of English are often perceived as having very nasal speech when they speak English.

By Sarah Beemer
Course: Language Sound Structures (Ling 3100)
Advisor: Prof. Rebecca Scarborough
LURA 2018

In most languages, including English, vowels that occur next to nasal consonants (m, n, and ng in English) are produced as slightly or entirely nasal. I saw this as phonetically interesting. In my research, I compared nasalized vowels before nasal consonants in the English speech of two first language (L1) speakers of English and two French second language (L2) speakers of English. My hypothesis was that the French L2 speakers would have more nasal vowels than the L1 speakers.

These vowels were investigated in the form of spectrograms, which are visual representations of a spectrum of sound over time. I also investigated the auditory perception of the vowels by a third party listener. The listener was not given any information about their task, and they simply listened to the words and described the vowels as nasal or not nasal. There were three ways to identify nasalization in the vowels: if the third party listener perceived the vowels as particularly nasal, if the spectrograms showed less noise in specific areas (between F1 and F2, also known as a nasal zero), and if the spectrograms showed a larger range of frequencies in specific places (increased bandwidth of F1).

I looked at the same five vowels for each speaker. I took my French L2 English speech from YouTube interviews of a famous French actor, Jean Reno, and a famous French actress, Catherine Deneuve. I recorded the English L1 speech myself and used the same sentences spoken by the L2 speakers in their interviews. This way I ensured that the vowels I compared would be the same, with the exception of accent.

In the end, my hypothesis was perceptually supported. The third party listener heard the French speakers’ vowels as more nasal than the native English speaker's vowels, and the male French speaker's vowels as nasal more often than the female French speaker's vowels.

The spectrogram data reported both in favor of the hypothesis and against it. The nasal zeros (lack of noise between F1 and F2) were the most varied observations. The female French speaker's spectrograms showed a nasal zero 1/5 times, and the male French speaker showed a nasal zero 2/5 times. Below is a set of 3 spectrograms for a single vowel (/æ/) (1 for Jean Reno, and 1 for each English L1) in which a much lighter space (nasal zero) is seen between F1 and F2 of Jean Reno's vowel:

However, bandwidth data did support the hypothesis in regard to the male French speaker, but not in regard to the female French speaker as seen in Figures 1 and 2 below:

Some of the bandwidth data for English L1 speakers was much lower than expected. The majority of the spectrogram information did not support the hypothesis, but there was more support seen with Jean Reno's data than with Catherine Deneuve's. It is possible that nasal zero data is not as salient as bandwidth data in perception. It also turns out that the way people perceive speech sounds does not always correlate with the acoustic properties of those speech sounds, and as a result the bandwidth data is likely the most crucial.

There is an existing body of research on the human perception of speech sounds and how that perception is not always acoustically supported. It makes me wonder what it is about a French accent that lends people to perceive their vowels as more nasal when in reality they often are not. Because French has nasal sounds that are meaningfully contrastive, French speakers will be more perceptive of the presence or absence of nasal sounds. My new hypothesis is that this may very well have an effect on the way French L1 speakers speak English and they may have more conscious control over the presence of co-nasalization. Even though the hypothesis was not fully supported and some of the data was inconclusive, I still learned a lot in the process of doing this research.

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