Week 1: 28th Feb

Mon. 15:50-17:30

Praat I

Presentation slides: Phonetics Praat I

Basic functions of the Praat software

1. Speech recording principles.

   Basic advice on speech recording

2. Loading speech recordings in Praat.

3. Visualising Waveform, Spectrogram, Intensity, Pitch.

4. Selecting, editing, zooming the signal display.

5. Amplitude and intensity: distinguishing consonants and vowels in the speech waveform of your own voice.

6. Making vowel formant charts with a spreadsheet, using your Praat data.

All students must ensure that they have the following software on their laptops before the first class:

Praat (http://www.praat.org)

A spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc.

Week 2: 7th Mar.

Mon. 15:50-17:30

Praat II

Presentation slides: Phonetics Praat II

Annotation

Please download and consult these guides:

1. Basic advice on speech recording (by me)
2. The use of Praat in corpus research (by Paul Boersma)

Annotation of speech recordings means segmentation of the speech signal by assigning time intervals to the segments, and classification of the segments.

1. Segmentation of speech: identifying sounds and boundaries between sounds.

2. Classification of speech: labelling speech segments with words and syllables.

3. Saving annotations as speech files, extracting the information as a spreadsheet file (CSV format) and processing the data in a spreadsheet to identify timing patterns in your speech.

4. Comparison of timing patterns from the speech of different people.

TextGrid to CSV converter

Homework assignment instructions

1. Annotate the sentence "Today the weather is fine. I will go for a run. Then I will chill." with a tier called "Syllables" and, separately, your Chinese translation of the sentence.
   1. Load the TexGrid for your English annotation into a plain text editor (with no formatting!) such as Notepad.
   2. Click on one of the example links below.
   3. Delete the existing TextGrid at the bottom of the TGA page.
   4. Copy the whole TextGrid from your text editor into the TextGrid field on the TGA page.
   5. Check that "Syllables" is in the tier field, and "_" is in the pause field (without the " characters, of course).
   6. Click TGA output. It will take a few seconds. If there is an error, check your previous information entries.
   7. In the first table, look for the values mean rate, which gives you the speed (sometimes called "tempo") of the utterance, and for the nPVI, which tells you about the regularity of timing in the utterance.
2. Do the same for Chinese.
3. Compare the values for English and Chinese. Which conclusions can you draw from this comparison?

Time Group Analyzer (TGA), Chinese TextGrid example

Time Group Analyzer (TGA), English TextGrid example

Week 3: 14th Mar.

Mon. 15:50-17:30

Praat III

Presentation slides: Phonetics Praat III

Tone and intonation

Spreadsheet showing analysis of durations, nPVI, rhythm charts:
LibreOffice Calc (ods)
Excel (xlsx)
Excel (xls)

1. Phonation rate, fundamental frequency (F0) and pitch.

2. F0 parameter settings for different voices.

3. Local F0 properties:

   1. Measuring F0 peaks and troughs.

   2. Local functions of F0: tones, pitch accents: pitch phonemes and pitch morphemes.

   3. Low pitch and creaky voice, Mandarin Tone 3.

   4. Boundary tones and final lowering.

4. Global F0 properties:

   1. Upslope and downslope.

   2. Raised F0, lowered F0.

5. Intonation:

   1. Functions of intonation

   2. Low frequencies and creaky voice: Mandarin Chines Tone 3.

   3. Analysis of F0 with a spreadsheet.

Prof. Dafydd Gibbon’s phonetics lecture schedule for 94 translation students

The lecture will be concerned with the importance of phonetics – knowledge about the sounds of language – for translation and interpreting. Clearly, knowledge of all areas of phonetics is essential for interpreting, speech-to-speech translation: not only pronunciation of speech sounds, but also tones and pitch accents, and the appropriate intonation. But also written language and its homophones and homographs need an understanding of speech sounds in order to understand rhetorical styles and verbal humour.

Students must download and study a copy of the IPA chart before the class starts:

https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/IPA_Doulos_2015.pdf

Please create a WeChat group for this lecture and include me!

Week 1: 28th Feb

Mon. 18:30-20:10

Phonetic basics

Presentation slides: Phonetic Basics

Sounds and spellings

1. English spelling and its history.

2. Homophones and homographs

3. How do we speak? The IPA

4. World Englishes and their sounds.

Prof. Dafydd Gibbon’s phonetics lecture schedule BA English

The lecture will be concerned with the importance of phonetics – knowledge about the sounds of language – for understanding English. not only pronunciation of speech sounds, but also tones and pitch accents, and the appropriate intonation. But also written language and its homophones and homographs need an understanding of speech sounds in order to understand rhetorical styles and verbal humour.

Students must download and study a copy of the IPA chart before the class starts:

https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/IPA_Doulos_2015.pdf

Week 1: 29th March

Tue. 18:30-20:10

Phonetics of English

Presentation slides:
BA English Phonetics 1

English sounds and spellings

1. English spelling and its history.

2. Homophones and homographs.

3. Sound production: the Source-Filter Model.

4. Prosody: Rhythms and Melodies of Speech.

Week 2: 12th April

Tue. 18:30-20:10

Phonetics of English

Presentation slides:
BA English Phonetics 2

World Englishes

1. Prosody: Rhythms and Melodies of Speech.

2. The IPA: consonant and vowel charts.

3. World Englishes.