SINGING PORTUGUESE NASAL VOWELS: PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING NASALITY IN BRAZILIAN ART SONGS

The articulation of Portuguese nasalized vowels poses some articulatory problems accompanied by negative acoustic effects for the performance of Brazilian art songs. The main objective was to find strategies that permit the singer to conciliate an idiomatic pronunciation of these vowels with a well-balanced resonance, a desirable quality in classical singing. In order to devise these strategies, the author examined sources dealing with nasalized vowels from varied perspectives: acoustic properties of vowel nasalization, phonetic and phonological aspects ofBrazilian Portuguese (BP), historical views on nasality in singing, and recent vocal pedagogy research. In addition to the overall loss of sonority, the main effect of nasalization is felt mainly in the first formant (F1) region of oral vowels, due to the introduction of nasal formants and antiformants, and to shifts in the tongue posture. Several sources report the existence of a nasality contour in BP, by which a nasalized vowel starts with an oral phase and transitions gradually to a nasal phase. The author concludes that the basic approach to sing nasalized vowels in BP is (1) to find the tongue posture corresponding to the oral vowel congener (the “core vowel”), and (2) to adjust the nasality contour in such a way that the oral portion remains prominent in order to keep the resonance balance consistent during the emission of the vowel. Once the core vowel is determined, standard vowel modification choices can be made according to voice type and the musical context in which the vowel is being sung. Some challenging excerpts from Brazilian art songs are examined, with suggestions for the application of the discussed strategies

Production and perception of stop consonants in Spanish, Quichua, and Media Lengua

This dissertation explores the phonetics and phonology of language contact, specifically pertaining to the integration of Spanish voiced stops /b/, /d/, and /g/ into Quichua, a language with non-contrastive stop voicing. Conflicting areas of convergence of this type appear when two or more phonological systems interact and phonemes from the target language are unknown natively to speakers of the source language. Media Lengua is a mixed language with an agglutinating Quichua morphology, and Quichua syntactic and phonological systems where nearly all the native Quichua vocabulary has been replaced by Spanish. This extreme contact scenario has integrated the voiced stop series into Media Lengua and abundant minimal pairs are present. If the phonological system of Media Lengua is indeed of Quichua origin however, how have speakers integrated the voiced stop series productively and perceptually? Have they adopted different strategies from Quichua speakers? If so, how do they differ? Chapter 1 sets the scene with an in-depth description of how contact between Spanish and Quichua has mutually influenced each language at the morphosyntactic level. Chapter 2 explores voice onset time (VOT) production in all five language varieties. Statistical modeling is used to search for differences in duration while taking into account a number of linguistic and demographic factors. Chapter 3 investigates stop perception in Media Lengua and Quichua, and uses Urban Spanish as a point of comparison. Chapter 4 looks at phonetic pre-nasalization in voiced stops across Media Lengua, Quichua, and Urban Spanish. Chapter 5 describes allophonic variations in stop production. The final chapter speculates on the nature of sound change at the phonetic level and explores possible origins of Media Lengua. Production results show that Media Lengua VOT duration values have shifted away from Quichua towards Rural Spanish. The perceptual results show an age-based effect with older Quichua speakers, which shows more random responses to the stimuli than younger speakers. This effect was not found in Media Lengua or Urban Spanish speakers. Similar age-based results were also found for stop weakening tendencies in Quichua and L2 Spanish speakers, while Media Lengua, Rural, and Urban Spanish speakers were not significantly affected by age

Towards an empirical and typological exploration of the sonority of nasal vowels

Ce mémoire est une étude phonologique et phonétique visant à ordonner les voyelles nasales en fonction de leur degré en sonorité. Jusqu'à présent, la sonorité des voyelles nasales n’a pas été abordée dans la littérature phonologique et phonétique; ainsi, cette étude vise à combler cette lacune de la recherche en menant une étude typologique et expérimentale des différentes qualités des voyelles nasales. La première partie du mémoire comprend un examen du comportement et de la distribution des voyelles nasales dans les langues du monde afin d'élucider leur place dans l’échelle de sonorité. La partie typologique montre que, dans trois des langues étudiées, seules les voyelles nasales hautes subissent des processus phonologiques comme l’harmonie nasale et la réduction vocalique tandis que, dans deux des langues étudiées, seule la voyelle nasale basse subit des processus phonologiques comme le changement vocalique déplacement de la voyelle et l’attraction de l’accent. La deuxième partie est une expérience nasométrique dans laquelle l’intensité des voyelles nasales et orales est mesurée. L’analyse d’intensité permet de déterminer le niveau de sonorité de chaque voyelle nasale car l’intensité est considérée comme le corrélat physique le plus saillant de la sonorité. L'analyse statistique descriptive effectuée sur l'ensemble des données des voyelles organisées selon leur hauteur (c'est-à-dire haute, mi-haute, mi-basse ou basse) et leur type (nasal ou oral) montre que [a] est la voyelle orale la plus haute en intensité relatif. Quant aux voyelles nasales, [ĩ] est la plus élevée en intensité. Ainsi, suite à l’analyse statistique inférentielle, nous avons établi une échelle permettant de classer les voyelles orales et nasales en fonction de leur intensité.This thesis is a phonological and phonetic study to classify nasal vowels according to their rank in sonority. To date, the sonority of nasal vowels has not been covered in the phonology and phonetics literature; thus, this study aims to fill that research gap through conducting a typological and experimental investigation of different qualities of nasal vowels. The first part of this thesis includes an examination of the behaviour and the distribution of nasal vowels in the world’s languages to elucidate the place of nasal vowels in sonority hierarchy. The typological part of this study shows that, in three selected languages, only high nasal vowels undergo phonological processes such as nasal harmony and vowel reduction while, in two other selected languages, only the low nasal vowel undergoes phonological processes like vowel shift and attraction of stress. The second part of this study presents the findings of a nasometric experiment in which the intensity of nasal vowels and oral vowels is measured. Analysing intensity helps to determine the level of sonority of each nasal vowel, because intensity is considered the most salient physical correlate of sonority. The descriptive statistical analysis performed on the data set of vowels organized according to height (i.e., high, mid-high, mid-low, and low) and type (nasal or oral) shows that, [a] is the highest in relative intensity. As for nasal vowels, [ĩ] is the highest in intensity. Thus, according to the inferential statistical analysis, we established a scale that classifies oral and nasal vowels according to their intensity

Towards a Multimodal Silent Speech Interface for European Portuguese

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the presence of environmental noise is still a hard problem to tackle in speech science (Ng et al., 2000). Another problem well described in the literature is the one concerned with elderly speech production. Studies (Helfrich, 1979) have shown evidence of a slower speech rate, more breaks, more speech errors and a humbled volume of speech, when comparing elderly with teenagers or adults speech, on an acoustic level. This fact makes elderly speech hard to recognize, using currently available stochastic based ASR technology. To tackle these two problems in the context of ASR for HumanComputer Interaction, a novel Silent Speech Interface (SSI) in European Portuguese (EP) is envisioned.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

A Description of the Sound System of Misiones Mbya

Misiones Mbya is an indigenous language of South America spoken by the Mbya people in the Province of Misiones, Argentina. Although there are several studies in the literature about the Brazilian variety of this language, the linguistic information available about Misiones Mbya is extremely scarce. In this thesis I present a segmental analysis of the language (individual vowels and consonants) and a prosodic analysis of nasal harmony based on field data collected in three different communities in Misiones. The segmental analysis shows that this variety is very similar to the Brazilian variety of the language with only a few exceptions. The prosodic analysis of nasal harmony indicates that nasality fades with distance. It is also shown that some methods for carrying out acoustic analysis of nasality can yield results which can be confounded with stress