Talk:Formant

message: The term "Formant synthesis" redirects here (and there's a synthesis template present), but there is no actual discussion about synthesis in this article.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.107.0.98 (talk) 22:01, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Synthesis 

message: I find the first line confusing. Please could someone make this clearer.
This whole article is in need of editing with rigour and and with careful attention to English expression.Yergnaws (talk) 13:42, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your edits! I personally like the fact that your definition, by mentioning a "broad peak", covers the two definitions that are generally found in the literature. However, I think that mentioning the existence of the two definitions (a peak in the filter function vs. a peak in the spectrum) may help readers that came to this page after encountering one or the other. But perhaps it indeed doesn't need to be the first thing the reader sees. So how about starting with you general definition, but then, maybe as part of History, we can mention that the term is used to  mean different things? – egaudrain (talk) 15:29, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Introduction

message: The article makes some incorrect statements about what kinds of sounds formants belong in.  For instance, "Not all sounds used in human language are composed of formants. Formants are restricted to sonorants [...]". Since formants are basically resonances of the vocal tract, they are always present regardless of the type of sound being produced.  The distinction between sonorants and obstruents (and various gradations between) concerns the means of exciting the resonances - whether by periodic voicing (in vowels) or by noise (in fricatives), for instance.  "Note that fricatives always lack formant structure and are distinguished by the frequency range with the most noise, as well as overall strength of frication."  Fricatives actually do have formant structure.  For instance, [S] and [s] are largely differentiated by the strength of the 3rd formant.  The fact that certain frequency ranges have more noise than others (depending on the fricative) is derived from the location of the noise source within the mouth.  For [s] it is near the teeth, so that low formants (resonances) belonging to the back of the mouth (behind the source) are not excited much - this is in contrast to vowels, in which the periodic voicing source is at the larynx so that all of the formants are excited strongly.  Check out Ken Stevens' book Acoustic Phonetics for confirmation. Lulich 02:07, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Formants in sonorants vs. obstruents 

message: The reference to Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" clearly doesn't belong in the opening paragraph.  Apparently, it was included only to illustrate that the word "formant" can refer to a peak in the acoustic resonance of a room.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Unfree (talk • contribs) 12:43, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Opening paragraph

message: What's Fant? Is it a company? A person? I'm confused.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.122.56.143 (talk) 02:27, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: What does the first sentence "Formants are defined by Gunnar Fant as..." mean? Was Fant the one who first defined formants? Or are we simply using his definition as a starting place? Could someone clarify this? Goochelaar (talk) 15:49, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

text: actually the term was coined by Erich Schumann in 1929 (de:Formant), the article should definitely be updated 79.49.120.35 (talk) 12:17, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Rather, Ludimar Hermann (1838-1914), according to the article about him. Bn (talk) 14:17, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fant? 

message: By definition, the information that humans require to distinguish between vowels can be represented purely quantitatively by the frequency content of the vowel sounds.
By definition?  Whose definition of vowel says this? 68.239.116.212 (talk) 03:34, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vowels 

message: I reached this article from a link on the word "antiformant" in the article Rhinoglottophilia. Neither article explains what an "antiformant" is. Collin237 166.147.104.149 (talk) 22:48, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Paraphrasing Glottopedia, an antiformant lessons amplitude at a given frequencies. The example is the effect of the nasal cavity on nasal vowels and consonants. The nasal consonant anti formants are more pronounced; the frequencies show greater "silencing".
66.81.29.144 (talk) 03:06, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is an "antiformant"? 

message: The study of speech acoustics has a long and inglorious history of treating the adult male voice as the basis for generalizations about speakers in general. Female voices are usually relegated to footnote status if mentioned at all. This article does nothing to redress the balance, but I think it should. RoachPeter (talk) 20:57, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: A complicated matter, and somewhat ironic: Women’s vocal tracts are more similar children’s and infants’, apart from being larger. It is men’s that are different from the others. So all that male-subject research focused on the anatomically NON-standard case. Jmacwiki (talk) 18:44, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gender bias 

message: As the formants are described in Hertz, it sounds like the article is saying that different vowels are made at different pitches.  Are the two actually related?  I am only confused.74.102.216.186 (talk) 02:04, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems that there is a difference.  I found out that a pitch is defined as fundamental frequency.  However, formant frequency can be described based off the length and width of your vocal cord when making the sound.  I found this article that can explain the difference: https://underlingsosu.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/phonetics-phriday-fundamental-frequency-harmonics-and-formant-frequencies/) (f.k.a. 74.102.216.186)LakeKayak (talk) 15:17, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

text: Not of the overtones (which arise solely from larynx).  From the resonances of the mouth, which filter those overtones to emphasize some and suppress others. Jmacwiki (talk) 18:39, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is a formant related to pitch? 

message: The lead section does not conform to MOS:INTRO as it is unnecessarily complicated by immediately diving into technical details how different fields of research use slightly different definitions, that are, as the lead itself states, in most cases irrelevant. Furthermore, this edit, said to "clarify" things, completely sweeped the formerly used definition from acoustics under the rug (i.e. a definition that is in the domain of sound without referring to human anatomy) and folded it in under the speech science definition of formants that refers to the human vocal tract. -- Theoprakt (talk) 07:41, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  lead section has both style and definition issues 

message: A vowel, according to him, is a special acoustic phenomenon, depending on the intermittent production of a special partial, or “formant”, or “characteristique”. The frequency of the “formant” may vary a little without altering the character of the vowel. For a, for example, the “formant” may vary from 350 to 440 Hz even in the same person. 
This talks about only one formant whereas the rest of the article talks about vowels consisting of two. In addition, the frequency values given for the formants of vowel a are completely different, 850 and 1610. --Espoo (talk) 14:20, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: It also uses “partial” as a noun, which is nonstandard usage, stilted at best (except sometimes in multivariate calculus). I’ll take a crack at it, but only in small steps. This talk page shows that lots of people have been very poorly informed by this page, both over the years and even in recent months. Jmacwiki (talk) 18:37, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  incomprehensible intro 

message: I have seen many, many vowel-space figures. Like most scientific figures where two variables have a conventional order (“x” before “y”, or F1 before F2), they plot the first variable horizontally, the second vertically.
Where did we get this diagram, which plots the transpose? Does anyone have a  more standard replacement? Jmacwiki (talk) 19:36, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vowel space diagram 

message: We start by saying that formants (apparently by definition) are spectrally broad. But in the Phonetics section, we say that singers create sharp resonances (formants) to select high vocal harmonics.
If we believe the second, then apparently we do not accept our own definition. Which to edit? Jmacwiki (talk) 19:58, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Width inconsistency 

message: The last 3 diagrams are all describing the same thing (actually the first two as well, just in a different form), so I've removed two of them. I really don't see the point of the "Average vowel formants for a male voice" table but I'll leave it for now. Also, this article seems extremely limited to only the perspective of phonetics when formants are supposedly integral to so many other fields as well. 30103db (talk) 16:54, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redundant diagrams 

message: The History paragraph gives F1 value for high vowels, but it lists a, which is low (adult F1 about 700 Hz, not 400) as the example. Now corrected. However, this example doesn’t fit very well in a History section anyway. Does anyone know the editor’s intention? Should the sentence be moved, or the section renamed?
Also, do we have agreed notation for vowels? IPA may be unkind to our readers, so I used a DARPAbet code, but we should have a better solution. Jmacwiki (talk) 06:20, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Long e 

message: I've seen a lot of charts based on empirical data (or statistical models) displaying ellipses rather than point estimates to give some idea of the distribution. (I'm writing this from the LSA annual meeting but I'm not a phoneticist.) It might be good to display an example here, both for its own sake and also to give readers a visual sense of the range of variation. 207.237.164.107 (talk) 04:10, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I have an as-yet unpublished paper from William Kretzschmar and Joseph Stanley in which they describe the history of this practice (and also explain the unusual 3rd quadrant axes) as a lead-up to criticizing it. Historically, once phoneticians began to be able to measure F1 and F2, they started plotting vowel sounds in F1/F2 space — using the 3rd quadrant axes once they realized that this would align the points with the IPA vowel chart quadrilateral. Originally, the ellipses were drawn by hand, encircling all of the data points (or all of the points that, by the researcher's impressionistic judgment, represent a particular vowel), but today, with much larger speech corpora and the ability to do automatic forced alignment with high accuracy, it is common to either present point estimates or to draw ellipses automatically to reflect a 95% confidence interval. Kretzschmar and Stanley note that F1/F2 values in large speech corpora are not normally distributed and thus using statistics that assume a normal distribution, such as mean and variance, is invalid. They further note that the empirical distribution is scale-invariant. This material was presented by Kretzschmar at the 2024 ADS annual meeting but the paper is as yet unpublished so it isn't WP:V and can't (yet) be used in this article. However, all of the historical claims are themselves cited to earlier sources; I just don't have the time to verify them in the library. 121a0012 (talk) 04:00, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: For a WP:V reference on the non-normality of linguistic data distributions, I did find . 121a0012 (talk) 04:20, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ellipses