Encyclopedia > Formant

  Article Content

Formant

A formant is a distinguishing or meaningful frequency component of linguistic utterance. By definition, the information that humans require to distinguish between vowels can be representated purely quantitatively by the frequency content of the vowel sounds. Formants are the characteristic harmonics that identify vowels to the listener. Most of these formants are produced by tube and chamber resonance, but a few whistle tones derive from periodic collapse of Venturi effect[?] low-pressure zones. The formant with the highest energy is called f1, the second f2 and the third f3. Most often the two first formants f1 and f2 are enough to disambiguate the vowel. Sonograms are used to visualise formants.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Great River, New York

... size is 3.36. In the town the population is spread out with 29.0% under the age of 18, 5.0% from 18 to 24, 29.0% from 25 to 44, 24.2% from 45 to 64, and 12.7% who are ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 49.1 ms