Reading the two articles this week, I had two different things in mind, both of which are very close to my heart: beatboxing and puns. Kenstowicz' article explores some rules of English grammar (to which there are many exceptions) that determine the context of a phoneme, which determines which allophone is present. The article also explored "collective phonetic illusions"--one of the examples was "tend" and "tent," especially in the plural "tends" and "tents." These words both omit the [t] and [d] sounds in the plural forms, and thus should sound phonetically identical- yet (as long as the speaker doesn't have a cold) we can usually distinguish between them.
For an even better example of this omission, however, we can look to puns: "You know what they say about camping. It's in tents."
Although we may have never had the intent to develop such puns (for who would intend to?), I for one am grateful for these phenomena of English phonology. That said, I'm glad to be able to distinguish them, so I can tell the different between a "ghost writer" and Ghost Rider.
The Gussenhoven article takes an anatomical approach to speech. This reminded me of the video of the vocal tract that we watched in class, and how the whole system operated in coordinated, swift, and planned motions. As a member of an a cappella group, I also sing quite a bit, and have recently been working on my vocal percussion techniques. I couldn't find many videos giving an MRI vocal of beatboxing-- in fact, this is the only one I could track down:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2OdAp7MJAI (beatboxing doesn't kick in until about 3:10)
I'd be super interested in seeing more work done on this.
I've also been thinking about how vocal percussion be notated in IPA, since many of the sounds are standardized-- the bass kick, for instance, is a bilabial plosive which can be voiced or unvoiced (and you can even put a trill [r] in there!).
Here's a chart I found, by the writer Gretchen McCulloch (there's also a bunch of great stuff on this blog about pop culture linguistics):
http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/84361063129/the-science-of-b-b-b-beatboxing
Since beatboxing uses the vocal tract, I'm very interested to see how linguistics and vocal percussion intersect.
Please post any comments, puns, insights, or better MRI videos and I'll check them out!
Interesting applications of the reading and the way you analyze how puns are a case study in how phonological pronunciation of the play on words related to the readings is a interesting insight into larger themes of linguistics in humor.
ReplyDeleteI found more interesting stuff!
ReplyDeleteGoogle Translate can beatbox pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAIHY0pb4xc
A better beatboxing MRI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvD3_j1E2wQ
Beatboxing and neurolinguistics:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5twcVZKHBAw
I hadn't considered the applications of phonetics to beatboxing before I read this post. I also thought it was an interesting point that we rely heavily upon context in interpreting speech when we think we can tell the phonetic difference between words. At least, I thought that was what you were getting at with the pun reference.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I also wonder if using your idea about puns being minor shift in vocalization can be used to predict puns for word jumbles so you can swap a letter with its vocally shifted form most likely to be found in the pun and then run anagrams of that.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I also wonder if using your idea about puns being minor shift in vocalization can be used to predict puns for word jumbles so you can swap a letter with its vocally shifted form most likely to be found in the pun and then run anagrams of that.
ReplyDelete