Tag: phonetics

I’m looking for volonteers.

I’m doing a project about the difference between pronunciation when one sings versus when one speaks, so I need some volunteers from Louisiana who can send me two recordings: one in which you sing a song unaccompanied and another in which you speak the same lyrics. If you would like to help me but don’t know how to record your voice, I can record it using Skype, but that requires that you know how to use Skype.

The song is Les Barres de la prison, the version by Canray Fontenot below:

Here are the lyrics:

Goodbye chère vieille mom
Goodbye pauvre vieux pop
Goodbye à mes frères et mes chères petites sœurs
Moi j’ai été condamné pour la balance de ma vie
Dans les barres de la prison

Moi j’ai roulé
Je m’ai mis à malfaire
J’avais la tête dure
J’ai rentré dans le tracas
Asteur je suis condamné pour la balance de ma vie
Dans les barres de la prison

Ma pauvre vieille maman
Elle s’a mis dessus ses genoux
Ses deux mains sur la tête, en pleurant pour moi
Elle dit, «Mmm, mmm»
Cher petit garçon
Moi je vais jamais te revoir
Toi tu as été condamné pour la balance de ta vie
Dans les barres de la prison

J’ai dit chère vieille maman
Pleure pas pour moi
Faut tu pries pour ton enfant, pour essayer de sauver son âme
De les flammes de l’Enfer

If you send me these recordings (to my e-mail address: josh8211@gmail.com or look under Contact above), please indicate the details below, all of which will remain anonymous:

Age:
Hometown:
Current City:
First Language:

If your first language is not French,

When you learned French:
How you learned French:

Please spread the word.

Blind guns and motorcycles.

I’ve noticed a feature of the speech of both Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart that seems a bit strange to me. Pay attention to how he Colbert pronounces his B’s in the following:

Normally this consonant would be pronounced as [b], just a regular stop, but Colbert seems to often use something like the trill [B]. Think of making the sound of a motorcycle by vibrating your lips, that’s the sound. For instance, at 3:16 when says breezy.

I’m not really sure what’s happening here. Maybe this is actually normal and I’ve just not noticed. It could also be a dialect change in progress but it seems kinda strange that I’ve heard this with Jon Stewart as well since they come from different parts of the country. It could also be just some mysterious ideolectal feature of fake news hosts. Who knows.

You are where you speak.

Continuing with posting papers I’ve done for school, here’s what I did for my phonetics class:

The Distance Between Acadiana and Cape May

This might be of more interest to my relatives than anyone else, really. I’ve taken out any reference to personal names since I didn’t get direct permission to publish this info but it’ll be obvious to those in the know.

I wish I had more time to devote to this paper but it took up probably more than 100 hours of work during the semester. There are definitely a lot of weaknesses in the analysis given that it’s the first thorough phonetic analysis I’ve ever done but I’m pretty satisfied with it given the constraints I did it under.

Also, I doubt I have anyone familiar with linguistic jargon (or even audio jargon) reading this blog so, if you’re actually taking the time to read the paper, you should totally ask about anything that’s not clear.

Don’t speak to me in that tone and/or melody.

Leos Janacek was the early 20th century version of Charles Spearin–check out The Happiness Project if you’re not familiar with it already–according to Jonathan Secora Pearl in his article titled Eavesdropping with a Master: Leos Janacek and the Music of Speech. Janacek apparently transcribed the speech of those around him into regular music notation. I did not know this, despite him being one of my favorite composers. I also didn’t expect to come across this information on Language Log, a linguistics blog.

Mark Liberman’s take on it seems to be that Janacek was simply fooling himself into thinking that speech contains discrete pitches as opposed to continuous slides, citing pitch-tracking software and Joshua Steele–whose 1775 essay related to the subject is awesomely available in full on Google Books. My hope is that he wasn’t naive but was simply trying to create a rough approximation of what he heard in speech. Afterall, Janacek was no scientist–notwithstanding his work in ethnomusicology. And music notation is only an approximation of actual music just as writing is an approximation of spoken language, if I’m not mistaken.

In any case, I’ll be reading through Steele’s essay and Pearl’s article as this seems to be combining all my favorite things. I’m anxious to find out just how much these transcriptions affected Janacek’s music as I’ve thought about incorporating this sort of thing into my own music–and I certainly have a large enough database of speech recordings to get started with.

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