mmhorii
Member
From: SoCal(tech)
Registered: 2009-07-28
Posts: 106
What perceptual cues do people use when decoding Japanese pitch accent? If the primary acoustic correlate is the fundamental frequency of speech, what happens when the fundamental frequency is replaced by noise?
The following paper, Hearing pitch despite its absence in "whispered" speech, presented at the 162nd Acoustical Society of America Meeting in 2011, investigates this question. Replacing the fundamental frequency from speech with noise results in audio reminiscent of whispered speech. Listeners can nevertheless perceive pitch accent in this “whispered” speech at better-than-chance levels. This finding suggests that there are as-yet-unidentified, weaker secondary acoustic cues that encode Japanese pitch accent.
dizmox
Member
Registered: 2007-08-11
Posts: 1149
I'm not sure what more one could say other than that the sound wave produced (whether whispered or spoken) has a different distribution of frequencies depending on mouth shape and tension/shape of the vocal chords. I guess you could easily do a spectrum analysis to show see the differences, but I don't think that would provide any insight on how to help beginners.
Last edited by dizmox (2013 March 31, 6:58 pm)
dizmox
Member
Registered: 2007-08-11
Posts: 1149
Yeah, I can quite distinctively, the first sounds "higher pitched", so I guess there's more comparatively more amplitude in the higher harmonics?
I guess there could be some minor differences in timing/overall amplitude too.
Last edited by dizmox (2013 March 31, 8:23 pm)
dizmox
Member
Registered: 2007-08-11
Posts: 1149
I could just be fooling myself, since I knew the differences beforehand. 8-) I might be picking up other subtle audial clues (other than frequency) that I can't pick out consciously, cuing my brain to fill in the missing frequency information.
Last edited by dizmox (2013 March 31, 8:36 pm)
Irixmark
Member
From: 加奈陀
Registered: 2005-12-04
Posts: 291
I can hear the difference quite clearly, although again I knew what to listen for.
I know nothing about vocal sound production and acoustics, but e.g. when you record musical instruments, you can "compress" the sound so that there are objectively no differences in volume (i.e. level of noise/sound produced), but pretty much anybody, musician or not, can hear what a "quiet part" is, or when there are dynamics, i.e. when the music goes from quiet to loud etc. How the instruments sound is strongly associated with a perceived level, but the brain is fooling itself into hearing the difference... perhaps something similar is at work here. Must be, though. Can you imagine you couldn't whisper in a tonal language?
