Building a Vowel: A Bottom-up Guide for Phonetic and Language Learning Sciences

Abstract

We present a guide for building a vowel “from the ground up” using software developed within the HumInfra infrastructure. Using this guide, a user may recreate in a simulation conditions for the production of a given vowel quality. It is summarized step-wise how a midsagittal view of a speaker’s vocal tract may be reduced to a simplistic sequence of two-dimensional segments, which – input into the simulation software TubeN – predicts and recreates the given vowels quality. Our hands-on guide is of interest to students in the linguistic and teaching sciences, and to those teaching speech science in a broader sense.