Phonetics--10/25/2012

We talked more about acoustic phonetics today, specifically how sound is actually transmitted, not just through speech, but with everyday objects. All objects have a natural tendency to vibrate, some more than others and they can be damped or undamped. A damped sound source would be something like a table. It makes noise when tapped on, but the sound dies out very quickly. A tuning fork, on the other hand, is an undamped sound source. It gets tapped lightly just once and the sound will resonate for a long time. The way the human vocal tract works is that resonating frequency (the frequency where a body naturally vibrates) changes as the shape of the mouth changes. So for different consonants and vowels, the resonating frequency changes and the vocal folds vibrate at slightly different frequencies for slightly different amounts of time.