John Maidment in his blog entry of the
25th of September wrote on the fall-rise and high fall versions of the sentence "would you like to go to a concert?" The fall-rise clip is the one which raised the question of whether there was a rise actually audible in the final syllable of the word 'concert'. Unfortunately the quality of the recording of this particular sound clip is poor. So I asked John to re-record it, with which he kindly complied, and he put a more recent version online. Listen to the clips. First you'll hear the high fall (which is uncontroversial), next the older version of the fall-rise (d'you hear a rise in <-cert>?) and finally the new version of it.
Next you can see the fundamental frequency contours of the three clips.
If the calculation of the fundamental at the end of the /
ə/ in
concert displayed in the second graph is correct and not an artefact, then the rise is really, really small, tiny, delicate, minute ...
The old version of the Fall-rise seems to me more spontaneous than the new one. And although the rise in the old version is very small, it nonetheless does "colour" the entire word CONCERT -I think.
ReplyDeleteWhat a manly voice!
@Beatrice: John called his 2nd version "more canonical". So - yes, it sounds as if spoken more carefully, in a more exemplary manner.
ReplyDeleteI'm keeping out of this ;-)
ReplyDeleteMasculinity (or effeminacy) is not the issue here
ReplyDelete