Assignment 2

Phonetic Alchemy:  turing a velar stop into an apical stop

Here is a wav file of me saying ‘ski’.  If you want, you can also use a file of any other native speaker of Am. English saying ‘ski’ (make sure you retain frequencies up to c. 10 kHz).

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B09lW9XhoFydNWU3ZDI0ZTktODZiNS00MmU3LWE2OGItMTk3MTUxZDlmZDJm&hl=en_US

1.        1.  Remove all of the /s/ up to the burst.  (What does it sound like?  Are you surprised?  It should be a voiceless unaspirated velar stop.)

2.      . Make a separate file of the burst up to the point where the vowel starts (evident as the start of periodicity).

3.        Apply a stop band filter to the burst (filter from 1500 to 4500 Hz; for a female voice you may have to have slightly higher limits; the idea is to filter out the mid-frequency peak in the burst spectrum).

4.    Substitute this filtered burst for the original burst.  What does it sound like?  (One listening strategy is to listen to it repeatedly and then to see if you could convince yourself it is /ti/ or /ki/).

Report your results by 2 August.