Daan Wissing

Multimodal Enhancement of Culturally Diverse, Young Adult Musicians: A Pilot Study Involving the Tomatis Method:

Musicians, seeking stress relief and vocal/instrumental enhancement, often turn to the Tomatis Method of sensori-neural integration training, based on the interdependence and interaction between hearing and listening, psychological attitude and speech and language. The paucity of impact studies on musicians, despite its acclaimed efficacy, has prompted the current multidisciplinary pilot study, involving a two group, pre-post experimental design. Listening aptitude, psychological well-being and vocal (voice) quality were assessed in availability samples of culturally diverse young, adult musicians (n=28), recruited from two tertiary institutions and assigned to a control group (n=10) and an experimental group, consisting of sub-experimental group one (n=10) and sub-experimental group two (n=8). Reasonable preprogramme group equivalence was established between the two sub-experimental groups and the control group. A Tomatis programme of 87.5 half hour listening sessions and concomitant counseling was completed by the total experimental group (n=18). Results indicated practically significant enhancement of: (i) listening aptitude on the Listening Test and (ii) psychological well-being, in terms of reduced negative and increased positive mood state (vigor) on the POMS in both sub-experimental groups, together with enhanced behavioural and emotional coping in sub-experimental group 1 on the CTI. (iii) Vocal enhancement, perceived both by singer-participants in both sub-experimental groups and a professional voice teacher, culminated in (iv) distinctly enhanced musical proficiency in 28% of all programme participants. Despite indications of multimodal enhancement, further research, necessitated by current methodological limitations, remains a prerequisite for achievement of definitive results.

Lessac's y–buzz as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of the projection of an actor's voice.

This article is a preliminary study on the effects of Arthur Lessacsy-buzzas a tool in teaching projection of an actors voice. The y-buzz is described as part of the Lessac System. Leinos formulation of the actors formant is presented. Following this, LTAS analyses of the y-buzz and a prose extract from Lessac himself are done. LTAS analyses of a trained and an untrained male voice doing the y-buzz and speaking a prose extract are demonstrated. These analyses are compared to the LTAS analyses and results collated by Leino. The spectra analysed for the two male voices trained through the Lessac System seem to have an actors formant. This seems to suggest that the Lessac System may be an effective teaching tool in voice projection for actors. The need arises for a more indepth study in this field.

Final devoicing as a robust phenomenon in second language acquisition: Tswana, english and afrikaans.

The topic of this paper is the well-known phenomenon of final devoicing, which occurs in languages such as Afrikaans, Dutch, German and Russian. It is discussed against the background of second language acquisition. The aim of the discussion is threefold. First, a description is provided, based on original experiments, of the final devoicing that curiously takes place in the English utterances of Tswana native speakers. Second, the relevance of the results is pointed out to the theoretical notion of interlanguage phonology: this lies in the observation that both Tswana and English belong to the group of languages lacking final de- voicing: English essentially inexplicably lacks it, and Tswana completely lacks closed syllables. Third, details of the experiments are discussed, with data arrangements along several dimensions, taking into account the length of the vowel preceding the target consonant; the manner of articulation of the target consonant; and the notion that the speakers output may be influence...

DIE AKOESTIESE EIENSKAPPE VAN STEMLOSE EKSPLOSIEWE VAN AFRIKAANS

The voiceless plosives of Afrikaans: a first investigation. In this article the characteristics of the voiceless plosives of Afrikaans are investigated, with special focus on the affrictionjaspirat...

Voiceless plosives of tswana: An acoustic–perceptual investigation

In this article an acoustic and perceptual phonetic description of voiceless plosives in Tswana is attempted, as the only descriptions available at present were made from an articulatory perspectiv...

Emergent tonogenesis in Afrikaans

Afrikaans is usually described as having a contrast between prevoiced and voiceless unaspirated plosives ([b]-[p], [t]-[d]). This study documents an ongoing change in the pre-vocalic realization of the contrast. Preliminary data from five speakers show that all speakers produce some phonologically voiced plosives without prevoicing, with frequency of devoicing ranging from 30% to 85% across speakers. This devoicing is nearly categorical: VOTs of devoiced plosives average 12 ms and those of phonologically voiceless plosives average 17 ms. (By comparison, VOTs of voiced plosives average around Ő130 ms.) The contrast appears to be preserved in the F0 contour of the following vowel, which is 50 to 100 Hz lower (depending on the speaker) after phonologically voiced than after phonologically voiceless plosives. The F0 difference continues through at least 70% of the vowel. However, post-plosive F0 variation is not contingent on devoicing, e.g., F0 contours after phonological /b/ are the same regardless of whether the production is [p] or [b]. In these preliminary data, the magnitude of the F0 difference is linked to speaker age, with younger speakers showing a larger difference. Data from a larger group of speakers are being analyzed and will be presented.

Gevorderde akoestiese korrelate van Afrikaanse klemtoon

In Wissing (2007) an investigation was conducted into the traditional stress parameters of Afrikaans (fundamental frequency, intensity, duration and vowel quality). In the present study the focus is on a number of less well-known, as well as some totally new parameters. The former set of parameters was taken over from the influential work of Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996a) on Dutch stress. The rest are deducted from general descriptions of the process of phonation, in particular during the stressing of syllables/vowels. An example of the former group of parameters is F0 gradient. Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996a) describe this in terms of F0 movement. The latter refers to parameters such as the starting and end points of such F0 gradient, as well as those of intensity and vowel formant moves. Results reported by Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996a) in the case of Dutch are contradicted by the current finding that accent-lending F0 movement is restricted to sentence accent contexts. Important results include the support of one of the main findings of Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996a), namely the necessity of taking into account the specific word and sentence contexts when analysing stress parameters. Linguistic stress has to be distinguished from sentence accent. A specific property of accent is that it normally enhances the manifestation of stress. This is true for most of the acoustic correlates under scrutiny in this study. Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996a) found that BdF_2, that is intensity located in the spectral region of 2 kHz to 5 kHz, proved to be a better indicator of stress than overall intensity (i.e. the whole spectrum, from 0 Hz to 5000 Hz). This finding of theirs was supported in the case of Afrikaans /A/. Of the new parameters, the gradient of F1, and in particular the end point of F1, seem to be powerful instruments in describing vowel reduction as a phonological process. As a result, unstressed /A/ tends to shift in the direction of schwa (/@/). This is evident from the F1 readings (cf. Wissing, 2007), but even more so, from the gradient and end point of F1. Harmonicity-to-Noise Ratio is a parameter we stumbled on by accident. Although this is not one of the most powerful parameters in comparing stressed with unstressed vowels, in most contexts the difference found in such comparison turned out to be of practical significance. The same goes, albeit to a much lesser degree, for the bandwidths of the first three vowel formants. When all of the parameters considered in both studies on the acoustic correlates of stress in Afrikaans were pooled in one comprehensive cluster — consisting of 24 parameters in all — the success rate was lifted considerably. It is recommended that, in the realm of speech technology, such a total cluster should be used for detection of stressed vowels. This is particularly the case with grapheme-to-phoneme converters.

Aspiration of English voiceless stop consonants in Southern Sotho: a case study

This article investigates voice onset times (VOT) as produced by Southern Sotho speakers in their own language and in their pronunciation of English. Three levels of L2 proficiency are considered, namely those of Grade 7, Grade 12, and graduated Southern Sotho speakers of English—each group a minimum of five years apart. The purpose is to study the interaction between two similar, yet distinct consonantal systems in the process of language acquisition, viz. aspirated consonants of Southern Sotho and English. Of special theoretical interest is the fact that Southern Sotho possesses a dual system, in which presence or absence of aspiration is phonemic, in contrast with English, where aspiration is phonetically motivated and thus a predictable feature, dependent on factors such as position in a syllable, or of stress. Presence or absence of aspiration is often taken to be a notable trait characterizing the nativeness of second- language accents. The most important findings of this investigation are that VOT values of the three diverse groups do serve as a discriminative factor as long as the data sets are sufficiently large. In such large sets, the results support the general hierarchy for the place of articulation of voiceless aspirated stops in Southern Sotho as well as in the English accent of Southern Sotho speakers. When VOTs per group are considered, the pattern tends to get disturbed. On the grounds of the results, a specific kind of language interference rather than the usual one of negative language transfer is proposed. The theory of lexical frequency turns out not to be able to explain some specific findings, e.g. the behaviour of the bilabial [ph] in the English productions, especially that of the youngest group of speakers.

Plosive voicing in Afrikaans: Differential cue weighting and tonogenesis

Abstract This study documents the relation between f0 and prevoicing in the production and perception of plosive voicing in Afrikaans. Acoustic data show that Afrikaans speakers differed in how likely they were to produce prevoicing to mark phonologically voiced plosives, but that all speakers produced large and systematic f0 differences after phonologically voiced and voiceless plosives to convey the contrast between the voicing categories. This pattern is mirrored in these same participants’ perception: although some listeners relied more than others on prevoicing as a perceptual cue, all listeners used f0 (especially in the absence of prevoicing) to perceptually differentiate historically voiced and voiceless plosives. This variation in the speech community is shown to be generationally structured such that older speakers were more likely than younger speakers to produce prevoicing, and to rely on prevoicing perceptually. These patterns are consistent with generationally determined differential cue weighting in the speech community and with an ongoing sound change in which the original consonantal voicing contrast is being replaced by a tonal contrast on the following vowel.

F0 and plosive voicing in Afrikaans

Afrikaans plosives are traditionally described as contrasting in voicing ([b d] vs. [p t]). Coetzee et al. (2014, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 135, 2421), however, showed that the voicing contrast is collapsing word-initially, with voiced plosives merging with voiceless plosives. They also found that voicing loss does not result in loss of lexical contrast, which is preserved on the following vowel (high f0 after historically voiceless and low f0 after historically voiced plosives). That study investigated word-initial plosives, leaving unanswered whether word-medial plosives are also devoicing. The current study addresses this question. Acoustic analysis of data collected from nine Afrikaans speakers replicated the results of Coetzee et al. for word-initial plosives. For word-medial plosives, a robust voicing contrast was found along with a post-plosive f0 difference. The f0 difference in medial position was comparable to that in initial position in both magnitude and duration, and extended throughout the vowel. ...