5. Reading a Spectrum (Spectogram)
One of the reasons I'm so insistent on using Setparam to oto is that with Setparam, you can see a detailed audio spectogram of your recordings which allows you to be more precise than if you were just looking at the waveform. A spectogram (here on called "spectrum") is a visual representation of recorded audio, and it's immensely useful when otoing. Learning to recognize the different parts of a spectrum will be imperative to the following tutorials.
The easiest things to recognize on a spectrum are vowels and consonants. Vowels look like repeating, regular patterns. Consonants vary greatly from one another, but can generally be sorted into three categories: Hard, Soft (voiced) and Soft (unvoiced). Black areas represent silence. See Figures 1 - 4 below.
Another thing that's important to recognize on a spectrum is aspiration. Aspiration is a very short puff of air that may occur after hard consonants. It's very important for most otos (especially CVVC and English otos) to be able to differenciate between the main part of the consonant and the aspiration. In Figure 5, the area in the red box is the main area of the consonant, and the green box is the area where aspiration takes place.
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