Dieter Maurer – författare

It seems as if the fundamentals of how we produce vowels and how they are acoustically represented have been clarified: we phonate and articulate. Using our vocal chords, we produce a vocal sound or noise which is then shaped into a specific vowel sound by the resonances of the pharyngeal, oral, and nasal cavities, that is, the vocal tract. Accordingly, the acoustic description of vowels relates to vowelspecific patterns of relative energy maxima in the sound spectra, known as patterns of formants.The intellectual and empirical reasoning presented in this treatise, however, gives rise to scepticism with respect to this understanding of the sound of the vowel. The reflections and materials presented provide reason to argue that, up to now, a comprehensible theory of the acoustics of the voice and of voiced speech sounds is lacking, and consequently, no satisfying understanding of vowels as an achievement and particular formal accomplishment of the voice exists. Thus, the question of the acoustics of the vowel – and with it the question of the acoustics of the voice itself – proves to be an unresolved fundamental problem.

In a first treatise on vowel acoustics, entitled Preliminaries, intellectual, methodological and empirical reasoning was exposed that gives rise to scepticism about the prevailing acoustic theory of the vowel, the formant theory.In this second treatise, pursuing the quest for the acoustic representation of vowel quality, the variability of the vowel spectrum and its dependence on fundamental frequency is revisited on the new empirical basis of the Zurich Corpus of Vowel and Voice Quality, with the aim of formulating knowledge-based statements concerning the spectral representation of vowel quality in general and of questioning the cause of the observable relation of the vowel spectrum to fundamental frequency. As a central result, three statements are presented that serve as primary indices for a future acoustic theory: The vowel sound is a kind of perceptual and acoustic foreground–background phenomenon, spectral representation of vowel quality is nonuniform and, most importantly, the recognition and spectral representation of the vowel does not relate to fundamental frequency but to pitch (or to a comparable perceptual reference).The treatise concludes with a reflection on the prerequisites and challenges of building a future acoustic theory of the vowel.