This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 64: Making speech visible with spectrograms. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 64 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about ways of seeing sound waves. But first, LingComm grants are running again in 2022. These are small grants designed to help people start new projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences.

Gretchen: This year we have one $500.00 grant and ten $100.00 start-up grants. We’ll add additional grants if we end up with more patrons by the time the grant applications close. We started the LingComm grants because a small amount of seed money would’ve 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.

Lauren: Information is on the LingComm website. That’s “comm” with two Ms. We’ll put the link on our shownotes. The grants close at the end of March 2022.

Gretchen: Also, our most recent bonus episode was an interview chat about linguistics fiction we’re reading, our favourite linguistics terminology, and what’s ahead for Lingthusiasm in 2022. You can listen to that and many, many more bonus episodes by becoming a patron at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Learning about sounds in an intro linguistics class is kind of weird because we’re already generally really good at processing sounds. We’re doing it right now. One of the things that you end up having to figure out how to do is how to unlearn some of that automatic processing that you’ve been doing since you were a tiny kid and re-learn how to process it in a more awkward way so that you can actually look at what’s going on there and not this very sophisticated object that your brain has made it into, which is language.

Lauren: Framing it as a process of un-learning is a really nice way of putting it. I know some profs teach phonetics using sign language phonetics and hand shapes first because, for non-signers, there’s less for them to un-learn. But when it comes to learning speech sounds, if you’ve grown up with a spoken language, it really is hard to actually pay attention to what you’re so used to attending to.

Gretchen: It’s often hard to believe. Like, what do you mean these two things that I think of as the same T sound are actually different T sounds? They seem the same to me. I’m used to thinking of them as the same. It’s necessary for my understanding of this language that I’m very fluent in that I treat them the same way but trying to figure out and unpack what’s actually different about them is this long process that you encounter in introduction to linguistics.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 64: Making speech visible with spectrograms

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!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Spectrogram demo video

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 Academo.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.

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.

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!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Lingthusiasm Episode: All the sounds in all the languages - the International Phonetic Alphabet
• Lingthusiasm Episode: Vowel Gymnastics
• Wikipedia entry for Spectrograms
• Wikipedia entry for Praat
• Praat in action via DaoWaves on YouTube
• All Things Linguistics post on creating spectrograms in Praat: The briefest possible intro with hands-on activity
• A Brief History of Spectrograms by Earbirding
• Real time Spectrogram
• Real time Spectrogram with sample files
• Auditory Illusions: Hearing Lyrics Where There Are None via MonotoneTim on Youtube
• Secret images viewable in a Spectrogram of Aphex Twin’s music via Bastwood
• Wikipedia entry for Aphex Twin’s images and pseudonyms
• Video of Aphex Twin’s #2 (the long formula) on Window-licker 2001, showing the Spectrogram image
• Full YouTube video of this episode, which includes the 5 minute spectrogram clip
  

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

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Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles