Acoustics
Uni courses that start at eight are just way too freaking early :(. Especially when they go on for 4.5 hours. My life = hard.
But we did fun stuff in that course today! So it wasn't all bad.
So, when we talk, we use vowels and consonants, right? And a lot of hand waving and pulling faces and stuff, but I'm talking about actual speech. There's (as good as) always at least one vowel in a word, even though we only have five of them; a, e, i, o and u.
Now why's that? That's because consonants are nothing but noise. A vowel, on the other hand, is more than noise. It's harmonic.
You probably all know these sort of pictures:
That's someone talking. Or it might be a song. I don't know what it is, actually, because I stole it off the intarwebz, lol ;). Anyway, it's some sort of sound like one might encounter it in every day life.
Now, a spectrum like the one above is actually nothing more than a combination of a lot of single graphs like this one:
This is a so-called pure tone. In German, it's called "Sinuston" because the course always follows a sinus pattern. For once, I like the German word better than the English one ;). Pure tones never occur naturally. If you hear a pure tone, it's always being produced by some sort of device. You know how old TVs sometimes do this annoying whining thing? That's a pure tone.
The above pure tone has a frequency of 500Hz and an amplitude of - well, the ordinate doesn't have a scale, so let's say for the sake of simplicity that it has an amplitude of 1. The frequency of a wave is defined in Hertz, which is the same as one-per-second. A frequency of one Hertz would be one something per second.
One what? One complete wave period. A wave period is the time it takes a sinus wave to complete one upwards and one downwards curve. The bluish shaded area in this picture is one wave period.
So, if we have a frequency of 500Hz, we have 500 wave periods per second. Sounds like much but isn't, really. You know that tone that violinists use to tune their instruments, the so-called concert pitch? Its basic frequency lies at 440Hz.
A very rough estimate of the frequencies our ears can pick up: 20 - 20,000Hz.
What does the frequency mean? It defines the pitch of a tone. The lower the frequency, the lower the pitch. The volume is defined by the amplitude - the bigger the amplitude, the louder the tone.
So, that's pure tones. I said those don't occur naturally. I lied. Well, not really ;). I did formulate imprecisely, though. Pure tones don't occur naturally on their own. Any tone that was produced naturally is always an overlapping of several pure tones. Which then produces a spectrum like the one I put in here as the first image.
Now, in speech, there are, as I stated above, consonants and vowels. Both consist of several pure tones overlapping in a pattern specific to the respective letter. The difference is this: while in consonants, the various pure tones stand in no relation to each other, vowels consist of one basic frequency and several so-called overtones.
What's an overtone?
An overtone is a pure tone that has a frequency which is an integer multiple of the basic frequency. So, for example, the concert pitch with the basic frequency of 440Hz has an overtone that has a frequency of 880Hz, and another one with a frequency of 1320Hz etc etc. If I were to put that into graphs, it would look like this:
Leftmost is the basic frequency, in the middle is the first overtone, and rightmost is the second one. Remember how the frequency defines the pitch of a tone? Overtones are always of a higher pitch than the basic frequency!
They are also always of a smaller amplitude, meaning they have a lower volume. It can vary, though, how much lower the volume is, depending on what produced the sound. A trumpet, for example, has very loud overtones. My music teacher used to say it has very many overtones, which isn't correct though. Other instruments have just as many overtones as the trumpet, it's just that with those, most overtones are of too low a volume to be heard.
That's also how the trumpet manages to make do with only three valves. As a trumpet player, you have 8 different lengths of tubing available - no fingers (one variant), one finger (three variants), two fingers (three variants), three fingers (one variant) makes 8 variants. Depending on how you're tightening your lips, you can "choose" your basic frequency in the overtone spectrum of one particular tube length. With 8 different lengths to choose from, the trumpet (more or less) manages to cover the whole of the chromatic scale over several octaves.
Can you tell I used to play the trumpet? Great instrument, but fucking hard to learn. I gave up at some point ;).
Enough with the trumpet tangents! Back to the vowels. Well, it's pretty much all said now. The reason vowels are harmonic and consonants aren't is that while consonants consist of several completely unrelated frequencies, vowels have a basic frequency overlapping with several overtones. That's what makes them sound so pretty ;).
I have two more images for you. These are images of the overtone spectra of two words: "hallen" (that's German and means "to resound"; it's pronounced "hall-len" - first part like "hall", but with a short, open "ah" like in the British "ta" for "thank you") and "halten" (German again, it means "to hold" and is pronounced like "hallen" only with a t in the middle).
hallen:
halten:
The dark lines are the loudest frequencies of the spectrum with the lowermost line being the basic frequency and the ones above it representing the overtones. Notice how with the word "hallen", there's no break in the basic frequency line, while the "t" in "halten" produces two short breaks in the word which flank the spectrum of unrelated frequencies that is the consonant "t" (see how it doesn't have any discernible basic frequency?).
Hee, this turned out way longer than I had planned. Lol.
In fandom news, I'm still adding to the Doctor Who fic *knocks on wood* and I even have a sort of a plot by now. Currently I'm trying to write a scene which should be funny - the Doctor being creeped out by a cat - but it's so hard to pretend to be someone who doesn't like cats! How can one not like cats? Cats are FTW.
Also, I made my first video icon, but it turned out way too dark and I'm NOT doing it again because it took me hours to make it (I had to figure out the technique first).
That's about it. I think I'll go and write some more now.
But we did fun stuff in that course today! So it wasn't all bad.
So, when we talk, we use vowels and consonants, right? And a lot of hand waving and pulling faces and stuff, but I'm talking about actual speech. There's (as good as) always at least one vowel in a word, even though we only have five of them; a, e, i, o and u.
Now why's that? That's because consonants are nothing but noise. A vowel, on the other hand, is more than noise. It's harmonic.
You probably all know these sort of pictures:
That's someone talking. Or it might be a song. I don't know what it is, actually, because I stole it off the intarwebz, lol ;). Anyway, it's some sort of sound like one might encounter it in every day life.
Now, a spectrum like the one above is actually nothing more than a combination of a lot of single graphs like this one:
This is a so-called pure tone. In German, it's called "Sinuston" because the course always follows a sinus pattern. For once, I like the German word better than the English one ;). Pure tones never occur naturally. If you hear a pure tone, it's always being produced by some sort of device. You know how old TVs sometimes do this annoying whining thing? That's a pure tone.
The above pure tone has a frequency of 500Hz and an amplitude of - well, the ordinate doesn't have a scale, so let's say for the sake of simplicity that it has an amplitude of 1. The frequency of a wave is defined in Hertz, which is the same as one-per-second. A frequency of one Hertz would be one something per second.
One what? One complete wave period. A wave period is the time it takes a sinus wave to complete one upwards and one downwards curve. The bluish shaded area in this picture is one wave period.
So, if we have a frequency of 500Hz, we have 500 wave periods per second. Sounds like much but isn't, really. You know that tone that violinists use to tune their instruments, the so-called concert pitch? Its basic frequency lies at 440Hz.
A very rough estimate of the frequencies our ears can pick up: 20 - 20,000Hz.
What does the frequency mean? It defines the pitch of a tone. The lower the frequency, the lower the pitch. The volume is defined by the amplitude - the bigger the amplitude, the louder the tone.
So, that's pure tones. I said those don't occur naturally. I lied. Well, not really ;). I did formulate imprecisely, though. Pure tones don't occur naturally on their own. Any tone that was produced naturally is always an overlapping of several pure tones. Which then produces a spectrum like the one I put in here as the first image.
Now, in speech, there are, as I stated above, consonants and vowels. Both consist of several pure tones overlapping in a pattern specific to the respective letter. The difference is this: while in consonants, the various pure tones stand in no relation to each other, vowels consist of one basic frequency and several so-called overtones.
What's an overtone?
An overtone is a pure tone that has a frequency which is an integer multiple of the basic frequency. So, for example, the concert pitch with the basic frequency of 440Hz has an overtone that has a frequency of 880Hz, and another one with a frequency of 1320Hz etc etc. If I were to put that into graphs, it would look like this:
Leftmost is the basic frequency, in the middle is the first overtone, and rightmost is the second one. Remember how the frequency defines the pitch of a tone? Overtones are always of a higher pitch than the basic frequency!
They are also always of a smaller amplitude, meaning they have a lower volume. It can vary, though, how much lower the volume is, depending on what produced the sound. A trumpet, for example, has very loud overtones. My music teacher used to say it has very many overtones, which isn't correct though. Other instruments have just as many overtones as the trumpet, it's just that with those, most overtones are of too low a volume to be heard.
That's also how the trumpet manages to make do with only three valves. As a trumpet player, you have 8 different lengths of tubing available - no fingers (one variant), one finger (three variants), two fingers (three variants), three fingers (one variant) makes 8 variants. Depending on how you're tightening your lips, you can "choose" your basic frequency in the overtone spectrum of one particular tube length. With 8 different lengths to choose from, the trumpet (more or less) manages to cover the whole of the chromatic scale over several octaves.
Can you tell I used to play the trumpet? Great instrument, but fucking hard to learn. I gave up at some point ;).
Enough with the trumpet tangents! Back to the vowels. Well, it's pretty much all said now. The reason vowels are harmonic and consonants aren't is that while consonants consist of several completely unrelated frequencies, vowels have a basic frequency overlapping with several overtones. That's what makes them sound so pretty ;).
I have two more images for you. These are images of the overtone spectra of two words: "hallen" (that's German and means "to resound"; it's pronounced "hall-len" - first part like "hall", but with a short, open "ah" like in the British "ta" for "thank you") and "halten" (German again, it means "to hold" and is pronounced like "hallen" only with a t in the middle).
hallen:
halten:
The dark lines are the loudest frequencies of the spectrum with the lowermost line being the basic frequency and the ones above it representing the overtones. Notice how with the word "hallen", there's no break in the basic frequency line, while the "t" in "halten" produces two short breaks in the word which flank the spectrum of unrelated frequencies that is the consonant "t" (see how it doesn't have any discernible basic frequency?).
Hee, this turned out way longer than I had planned. Lol.
In fandom news, I'm still adding to the Doctor Who fic *knocks on wood* and I even have a sort of a plot by now. Currently I'm trying to write a scene which should be funny - the Doctor being creeped out by a cat - but it's so hard to pretend to be someone who doesn't like cats! How can one not like cats? Cats are FTW.
Also, I made my first video icon, but it turned out way too dark and I'm NOT doing it again because it took me hours to make it (I had to figure out the technique first).
That's about it. I think I'll go and write some more now.