4/29/11

What a Slut Looks Like


There is confusion over what a slut is. Here is one slut, pronounced very carefully and recorded on a spectrograph.


Here's an explanation of the spectrogram.


Hmmm, still kind of geeky. Speech sounds are kind of like strumming a guitar, lots going on all at once.  The bottom pic shows the frequencies, the top one is just the volume.  The three red lines somebody drew on there are the three lowest 'formants' like the lowest guitar strings--they are the main ways to identify what vowel it is. Good phonologists can read these things almost like writing.




Yeah, yeah, you were hoping to see sexy pictures. OK, here--Rihanna shows us how it's done.


YEOW!



*not implying anything is bad about sluts. or dressing this way. or Rihanna.

3 comments:

Andrew Hall said...

I wonder what kind of search engine traffic you're going to get because of the word slut?

PersonalFailure said...

That is why my husband hates mixing. The vocals are such a bitch to mix in precisely because they are all over the place.

I do wonder if the waveform for slut is any different from the waveform for any one syllable word that begins with an "S" and ends with a consonant.

Also, that waveform needs to be deessed. (pronounced de-essed)

DFL said...

"I do wonder if the waveform for slut is any different from the waveform for any one syllable word that begins with an "S" and ends with a consonant."

I'm not sure if you can easily see the difference between "slut" and, say, "slat" in the waveform visualization (that is, the amplitude-vs-time plot, the top part of the chart).

But the difference is definitely present in the audio signal. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to hear it.

And with a little bit of practice, you can clearly see it in the spectrogram. (the bottom part, which is effectively a plot of the power distribution (darker=more energy) over the frequency range (vertical) vs. time (horizontal)