The Vowel Space

To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/DrGeoffLindsey/. The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.
0:00 Vowels are not discrete
1:50 Vowels and colour
3:40 Resonating cavities and formants
5:40 Synthesizing vowels with Praat Vowel Editor
6:33 Vowels and basic colour terms
8:24 Early phoneticians and the tongue space
9:36 The tongue quadrilateral and MRI
9:54 Daniel Jones & Cardinal Vowels
11:00 The real vowel space explains
14:07 Inconsistent vowel demos
15:07 Consistent vowels with technology
17:05 A 3D vowel space
For more detail, see my published article: Lindsey, G. (2017) 'Charting the vowel space', in G. Lindsey & A. Nevins (eds.) Sonic Signatures, John Benjamins, pp 134-144 www.jbe-platform.com/content/...
or see my blog article, which contains both clickable charts www.englishspeechservices.com...
Standalone clickable IPA chart: www.englishspeechservices.com...
Praat: www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
MRI vowel demos: www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-ch...
Peter' Ladefoged's Vowels and Consonants: www.vowelsandconsonants3e.com/
MRI clip by MART Production: www.pexels.com/video/a-sonogr...
Articulography clip, University of Tartu Phonetics Lab: • Carstens AG501 test
Pharyngometer clip: • pharyngometer demo
Cardinal Vowel charts: www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/courses/pl...
This video was sponsored by Brilliant.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/DrGeoffLindsey/. The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.

[@Somebodyherefornow]

what if you make the rounding into a third dimention, similarly to adding a z for the blue cone in CIE diagrams does that vowel chart exist?

[@beepboop204]

🙃🙃

[@yura2424]

0:05 I want to do like you at 0:05 I downloaded the Praat program from the description, but it does not work this way. It seem to be missing the audio files. Could you help to set it up, so it looks like yours?

[@Ggdivhjkjl]

Could you release a video on how to use Praat please?

[@amelali6299]

Dr Geoff Lindsey, could you please tell me what is the purpose of vowel space quality? Hope you reply as soon as possible

[@ksiistoyiiwa]

This is the best explanation of vowel quality I have ever heard - thank you, Dr Lindsey!

[@gagadaddy8713]

Thank Dr. for the great presentation! It is the best illustration for linguistic topic analog with science and math I have ever seen. I have pinned the IPA chart on my wall for years, but I never got an idea what exactly the meaning of x-axis and y-axis there and why schwa is in the center. This video answer all these queries which slept in my mind for ages. Love it!

[@springyb0i693]

Btw isn't Azzurro just azure?

[@rosehipowl]

I studied linguistics at university and I can't believe I was taught "wrongly"! Your chart makes a lot more sense to me - I hope it gets more widely adopted. I love your channel because it really has made me think differently about the things I was taught, like that analogy to the colour spectrum really made links in my brain that I had never thought of before!

[@Ggdivhjkjl]

For some years now, universities have perpetuated established teachings instead of being places of free inquiry. So it's not surprising you were indoctrinated into predetermined ideas instead of being encouraged to explore new ones.

[@Unbrutal_Rawr]

​@@Ggdivhjkjl This is a pile of holier-than-thou bullsh*t. All systems of knowledge are based on perpetuation, no system of knowledge is possible by making students invent the entire science from scratch. All institutions for instruction and disseminating knowledge operate with predetermined ideas by definition. This is not instead of encouraging people to explore new ideas - old ideas is the foundantion that anyone who wants to explore new ones must have firmly established. The vowel space diagram is a basic linguistic tool of description which is required for any linguist to be able to discuss their subject. Teaching it to students is no more and no less indoctrination in old ideas than teaching them algebra, or Venn's diagram. When you teach someone the vowel space diagram, you need to explain what exactly its symbols and dimensions represent. You cannot teach them the diagram with no explanation and then expect them to explore new ideas about what it all stands for. The point of this video was that the diagram can be made to more accurately account for reality if we assume that its dimensions represent something different than originally envisioned by its inventors, or many of its current users, namely sound frequency instead of tongue position.

[@marioluigi9599]

Get a refund. Lol

[@theoneandonlyyellowestball]

I learned all of this on Wikipedia. I've never trusted school.

[@flamingspinach]

Same here! I clicked on this video expecting to get a refresher on what I'd learned at university but got something completely different and better :) I had known about formants before, but never really explored the connection (or rather, the lack of connection) to the traditional quadrilateral IPA vowel chart.

[@lunasophia9002]

I'd like to point out how uncommon it is for an academic open source project like this to be so actively maintained. What often happens is a student (typically someone working on a graduate degree) will work on something as part of their education, finish their degree, and it never gets updated again. But praat has a history going back more than 18 years (the github repo only goes back to 2005, and even then they'd passed version 4). Quite impressive!

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Stunning.

[@DroolRockworm]

Then how have they not been able to make it work in real time yet?

[@lunasophia9002]

@@DroolRockworm Like most projects, lack of interest / time.

[@blerst7066]

The analogy between colors and vowels was perfect. I have no idea why I haven't seen anyone explain like this before.

[@Rjkooljay2]

"The Vowel Space" *yawn "The Vowel Space by Dr Geoff Lindsey" *click

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

I would pin this comment but my sponsors might not like it.

[@margett__]

As someone who's currently working on bettering their English pronunciation, the tongue position explanation never quite made sense to me. Thanks to your brilliant video, I can finally understand why. I find it so much easier to trust my ear and try and replicate sounds this way. Somehow my tongue and lips find their way by following the information my ears have gathered. Truly fascinating stuff.

[@sirknight4981]

Actually I never thought about that. How do we know how to replicate sounds with our mouth after just hearing them? I always found it strange when musicians talked of playing by ear. So many little miracles go unnoticed in the day to day.

[@PC_Simo]

@@sirknight4981 Yes. The brain be a wondrous thing, indeed. 👂🏻🧠👄👅😌

[@madisondampier3389]

As a choir singer, being able to replicate a sound I hear is just natural (as long as it's physically possible), I have so much experience with singing by ear that any sound I hear is immediately associated mentally with the position and movements my mouth and throat would need to take in order to produce it, I am pitch perfect! And this video is a phenomenal demonstration of this vocal space, even though the acoustics of our mouths is a highly complicated mess in reality, we can still use approximations of its shape to describe the differences between distinct sounds in our vocabulary

[@thedamned8202]

​@@sirknight4981I suppose we don't completely lose our ability to imitate sounds after our childhood

[@sirknight4981]

@@thedamned8202 Astonishing that we should have ever been blessed with it in the first place 😅

[@m.germano]

As a native Brazilian, I missed the NASAL set of vowels ã (nasal A - não) and õ (nasal O - aviões), as well as the unwritten (but nonetheless spoke) ˜u (nasal U - muito), ˜i (nasal I - quinto) and ˜e (nasal E - mente). It would probably require another 3rd (or even 4th dimension hahaha) vowel space representation. I should state that I LOOOOOVED your video. It's so instructive that I keep watching it repeatedly. Maybe, you are planning to create a video about the TONES of vowels like its used in Mandarin or Cantonese

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Thank you! Of course you're right that the video doesn't cover every aspect of vowels, particularly the "diacritic" features such as nasalization, voice quality and tone. Nasality has complex effects on resonance, affecting both the frequencies and bandwidths of the resonant peaks, so we couldn't simply add a dimension like F1/2/3.

[@mskiptr]

That's something I'm still wondering about. In my native language - Polish - we have two 'nasal vowels': ⟨ą⟩ and ⟨ę⟩. These are sometimes transcribed as /ɔ̃/ and /ɛ̃/, but also as /◌ŋ/, /◌ɲ/ and even /◌w̃/ (the last one is something I am yet to fully understand tbh).

[@thecviperspective5882]

​@@mskiptrIt's because the nasalization comes in in the second half of the vowel in Polish and Portuguese compared to French where the vowel is fully nasalized from start to end.

[@artugert]

​@@DrGeoffLindsey As for tone, my understanding is that it is a movement of the throat. I first heard this from Stuart Jay Raj, and as a speaker of Mandarin Chinese, I can verify that tones are produced in the throat. I would be very interested in seeing this explained more precisely.

[@rodrigohag]

@@thecviperspective5882 in Portuguese we have fully nasalized vowels from start to end, like ã (pão), õ (limões), an/am (andam), en/em (mentem), in/im (quindim), on (ontem), om (homem), un (unha), um (1)...

[@indus7841]

As a math guy. I like that you're representing vowels as a point in 2d space. Very clever my friend.

[@notwithouttext]

3d if you include er and even more if you include other variations

[@mertatakan7591]

​@@notwithouttextDo you mean rhotacization?

[@notwithouttext]

@@mertatakan7591 yes, but also rounding: rounded vowels have a slightly lower f3, distinguishing them from the normal centralized vowels.

[@vanderkarl3927]

Learning this feels a lot like when I learned that elementary school lied to me about red, blue, and yellow being the primary colors

[@Nikedemos]

I can see Dr Lindsey is trying to beat the record for the most dynamically changing thumbnail! We must be on version 9 by now :D

[@gameXylinder]

5:25 🤣 I burst out laughing at the "bluuu" 😂 You are both educational and hilarious!

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

6:30: I'm fine, thank you. And how are you?

[@PC_Simo]

For me, as an associative synesthete, who always saw vowels as more colourful (and ”round”), and consonants as more black-and-white (and angular), this fills so many gaps and answers so many questions. Thank you. 😌👍🏻

[@PC_Simo]

@Winged Jupiter Thank you for your interest, and your comment 😌👍🏻. Now that I think about it, I see vocalisations as sort of less saturated pastel versions of the colours of the corresponding vowels; and, in terms of shapes, as sort of polygonal, angular shapes, where the vertices/angles have been rounded. That’s an interesting question 🤔. I’ve never really given it much thought, since my native language (Finnish) lacks vocalisations. Thank you for the question, too. 👍🏻

[@danielbrockman7402]

I think by vocalizations Winged Jupiter simply meant vowels. In other words what colors are the vowels? What was it you thought vocalizations meant (the phenomenon that Finnish lacks)?

[@PC_Simo]

@@danielbrockman7402 Phenomena like ”the dark L” (a.k.a. ”L vocalisation”), which means kind of ”fusing” the ”L”, in words, like: ”Soul”, to the preceding vowel; and thus, pronouncing the ”L”, itself, like something of a vowel. So, in general: pronouncing consonants more like vowels.

[@PC_Simo]

@akotov OK. Yeah; well, I see vocalisations and semi-vowels as more colourful, amongst the consonants, for example, ”J” (which, in Finnish, represents the palatal glide: [j]; not the English-style voiced post-alveolar affricate: [d͡ʒ]), as dark green, and the glide: [w] (which I moreso associate with the symbols: ”Ʋ”/”ʋ”, than ”W”/”w”), I view as maroon. Vowels, I see as very colourful; like ”E”, I see as yellow, ”I”, I see as green, ”A” I see as (the original, non-CMYK-)magenta. Generally, I tend to see back vowels as having cold colours, and front vowels as having warm colours. Compared to a regular old consonant; like: ”K”, which I view as, basically, ranging from black to graphite grey (pencil grey); these are definitely more colourful. Senses are, indeed, connected; and scientists pretty much agree that everyone’s a synaesthete, in the very beginning of our lives; and it’s been proven that this synaesthesia can be re-triggered via psychedelics (surprise, surprise!). Yeah; that’s, pretty much, what’s been happening. Given this new information, like new sounds and letters; I then consult my inner synaesthete, for ”his” judgement, given the input, and there’s the answer. Since I mostly *_DON’T_* physically see the letters in these colours (projective synaesthesia), it might take a bit longer for the ”answer” to pop up, and maybe require information of both the symbol and the sound it represents. However; the synaesthesia (at least, in my case) could be used to make predictions and guesses about phonetics, like the continuum-like nature of vowels being hinted at, by their ”roundness” (and, to an extent, their colourfulness). Thanks for the questions. It’s interesting, even for me, to ponder these things, consciously. 😃👍🏻

[@PC_Simo]

@akotov Also; as for diphthongs, I tend to see them as combinations of the colours of their two vowel components (and sometimes, in an intermediate colour).

[@SiddharthS96]

Really interesting video! The comparison with colours reminded me of the terms used in Sanskrit: the vowel letters are called svara varna, which means resonant colours.

[@MrSlowrolla]

I have a degree in linguistics, majoring in phonetics (graduated 2013). I've since moved into a totally unrelated professional field, and sadly lost touch with a lot of concepts and ideas of phonetics, my formative passion. I must thank you for reigniting a nostalgic fire within me with this fantastic video! ❤️

[@SupGaillac]

It would be fun to see an animation of the great vowel shift on this diagram, with blobs representing a rough position of each vowel at a given time, slowly moving around :) Excellent video, which makes some much more sense to me than IPA diagrams on Wikipedia !

[@user-ty4jy4cp3r]

Those "голубой" and "синий" were scarily accurate

[@taylormanning2709]

Dr. Lindsey, you may not have known this application of vowel-space, but brass musicians use this as a pedagogical tool to describe ways of modifying their tone. Unfortunately, many of them reject the science of their art, but many of us understand this is a very effective way to develop a way to communicate about an essential part of what we do. Thank you for providing a video that I can send to my musical friends; as long as their minds are open, they will benefit greatly from your work. Sincerely - thank you

[@amj.composer]

Your content is absolutely insane [Just realized my comment may be ambiguous, I mean that in a good way]

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Insane comment, thanks!

[@jeff__w]

7:58 “…but it can be more challenging to hear vowel contrasts that your native language lacks.” My friend, a Korean, insists on pronouncing _beach_ as the exaggerated “beeeeach” to make sure he distinguishes between the “long e” and “short i” sounds. “It’s _okay,”_ I tell him, “you can shorten up that vowel length just a bit,” but he still persists. Too risky, I suppose. (Or he’s just trying to annoy me. 😂)

[@lock_ray]

It always felt like the way vowels are described in the IPA were a bit archaic/imprecise. It's so satisfying to see it described as a proper moduli space. I think there's probably something to be said about the topology of consonants too, even if much of it ends up being discrete, as suggested, it feels like some of the more R or L like sounds bleed together somewhat. It would be interesting to apply the same notion of formants there...

[@comradewindowsill4253]

no, you're on to something. mostly, there''s a system of fixed referents along with ways to record deviations from there, which kind of annoys me. who decided that retracted s was the weird thing and not 'normal' s? and there's different levels of retraction... obviously eventually you just get to 'sh', but it's much more a matter of degrees than is ever acknowledged.

[@cruztijerina9855]

This is mindblowing and somewhat intuitively understood by many but not articulated (clearly) by anyone until now. Thank you Dr. Lindsey !

[@amelali6299]

Could you please summarize the purpose of vowel space quality?

[@timgerk3262]

6:30 As an Iowan, I feel heard. It's been a long road, expressing our all-vowel nature in four glyphs.

[@resourceress7]

I know that eventually you will upload human-edited captions. But I have to tell you that the auto captions on the computerized vowel simulation are golden. "hi" "hey" "oh" "wait" "Oh yeah" "Oh yeah" "How are you" "How are you"

[@notwithouttext]

timestamp: 6:16 yeah they are great

[@robertjenkins6132]

When I fist started learning the IPA vowel symbols a few years ago, I could only distinguish them with minimal sets or minimal pairs, e.g., golf _putt_ ([ʌ]) versus _put_ ([ʊ]), although slowly I became better at distinguishing the sounds out of context, and at understanding tongue position and rounding. The bottom and lower-right corner were particularly difficult: a, ɑ, ɒ, ɔ. The latter three are merged into one phoneme in my American accent, and the first one, [a], I think is mainly only used as first element in the personal pronoun "I" diphthong, [aɪ]. I wanted to form a minimal set that would cover all the symbols used in the transcription of English, but I think that such a set would require pronouncing some of the words with a different accent, since they are not all distinct phonemes in my accent. I think "can, Khan, con, con (British accent), co(r)n (r-dropping accent), cone" could cover [æ] though [oʊ], if the words are pronounced appropriately.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Ladefoged used heed, hid, had, head etc.

[@pierreabbat6157]

I have a set, which uses some words with extra sounds: Beale, bill, bale, bell, ballot, Baal, ball, boll, bowl, bull, Boole, bulk.

[@columbus8myhw]

@@DrGeoffLindsey I like b_t, as in: bat bet bit bot/bought but bait beet bite boat boot (and even Bert). I _am_ missing a 'put' vowel, and to an extend a 'bide' vowel (as I pronounce 'bite' with a noticeably different vowel).

[@zak3744]

@@columbus8myhw Would the word "kibbutz" give you the missing vowel you are after?

[@columbus8myhw]

@@zak3744 I think I've mostly heard it said with a more Israeli "kee-BOOTS", using the [u] vowel, but I could see someone with an Americanized (or Yiddishized?) pronunciation say "[kɪˈbʊt͡s]" I guess. Accent on the second syllable only though.

[@tkmmusician]

It would be very interesting to discuss these ideas as they relate to classical singing and vocal technique!

[@Fafner888]

Absolutely, it's well known that some vowels are more conducive to beautiful or resonant voice production than others (for that reason, some opera singers use what's called "covering", for example changing vowels (in the sung text) such as \a\ and \u\ into \o\). I can imagine that science can aid singers at training their voices better and improving singing techniques. Unfortunately opera pedagogy is even less consistent and scientific than phonetics...

[@caboose202ful]

@@Fafner888 I believe the 'singer's formant' is relatively well described, so I wouldn't be surprised if research related to that has also gone into covering.

[@drayyoutube5843]

5:27 “And BLOO...” That part honestly makes me laugh out loud.

[@timolson4809]

How do the nasal vowels work in this chart? I’m in an a cappella group and vowel quality is considered quite important, and I think a vowel gamut chart would be cool to have. And I’m out last rehearsal we were talking about making a vowel a little bit nasal to sound brighter at the end of a song, and I’m wondering how this would be expressed on the vowel chart?

[@matthewbartsh9167]

+1 Good question.

[@kered13]

I don't know, but I found these lecture slides that discuss the acoustics of nasal vowels: www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2008/ling520/week8.pdf

[@vaheakli4551]

I think it would be easily represented with adding another dimension into that diagram. But being not very important for most of cases (like for colours, that are kinda better represented in 3 spaces without this added part for blue) it haven't find its way into. But sadly 4+ dimensional diagrams are not comprehensible as well as 2D ones.🧐

[@alexandrashvydun8726]

they're not represented on the vowel chart, but the IPA does have a diacritic for them en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasalization#:~:text=In%20the%20International%20Phonetic%20Alphabet%2C%20nasalization%20is%20indicated%20by%20printing,nasalized%20equivalent%20of%20%5Bv%5D.

[@muttlanguages3912]

A bit like putting a hat on the end of your trombone. Still the same note but sounds different, or something. Probably not the best analogy.

[@carlotapuig]

In 20min I have learnt more about vowels than in 5 years at uni. I'm not joking.

[@7MPhonemicEnglish]

👍🙌 I'm so glad that you're willing to turn tradition on it's ear. This was very educational. I've been thinking about the vowel space and how to identify ideal vowels that are easily differentiated from the others, such as might be done if inventing the ideal language from scratch. I never thought of comparing it to color space though. Another vowel that the traditionalists leave out of all the vowel charts in addition to the /ɹ/ is the "dark L" with it's radical tongue formation. The tongue is amazing. I had no idea what it was doing on the backside to effect sound.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Have you looked at my vocal organs video, where I likened the tongue to a badger?

[@7MPhonemicEnglish]

@@DrGeoffLindsey No, I'll check it out. Thanks.

[@7MPhonemicEnglish]

@@DrGeoffLindsey Done. Yes, that is an excellent video as well. MRI is a dream tool. The side angle doesn't show the tongue's ability to narrow & widen, although the narrowing may just be how it elongates. It seems to me to be a necessary aspect for the Dark L sound. Here's the video you spoke of: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iYeug2Z7iMl0oZo

[@matthewbartsh9167]

+1 " I've been thinking about the vowel space and how to identify ideal vowels that are easily differentiated from the others, such as might be done if inventing the ideal language from scratch." Wow. What an interesting idea. How about writing the vowels, or every letter, using colors?

[@7MPhonemicEnglish]

@@matthewbartsh9167 I think that methods which condense the written form of our language, reduce character count and ease of writing, are worth exploring. Changing from one colored pencil to another several times per word would be cumbersome though. Computers give us more options but we're not quite ready to give up hand-writing.

[@AntipodePolyglot]

Your pronunciation of the words "синий" and "голубой" was flawless! I run a KZbin channel about phonology in Russian and also another channel about linguistics in English.

[@confusedowl297]

Your reconceptualizations of phonetics concepts have helped me understand phonetics a lot better and also figure out why traditional ways of understanding it are often so confusing to me

[@CrysolasChymera2117]

As a lover of languages in general, that understands the complexities of phonology and grammar not just in English but in other languages as well, and that is interested in conlanging as well: I LOVE THIS KIND OF CONTENT! Edit: Your pronunciation of other languages sounds amazing :)

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Thank you!

[@ebey1525]

From one linguist to another, thank you for such a great video!

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

🙏🙏🙏

[@matthewgellar1442]

I saw a post somewhere that said "consonants are like a staircase, vowels are like a slide". This is the perfect expansion of that concept

[@Kris_not_Chris]

this really explains to me better why [ø] and [œ] always sounded rhoticized to me, and why [ʌ] sounds much closer to [ə] than it seems like it should

[@ScarfmonsterWR]

This would've been so useful when I was taught English pronunciation. The tongue charts just don't make any sense to me, and honestly every time I was told to pronounce the vowel as the chart says, it was worse than however I pronounced it before. The tongue chart also makes understanding how vowels relate between different languages much harder than it needs to be.

[@travelingonline9346]

If you plot F1 and F2 on x and y axes, reverse the orientations (i.e. right to left and top to bottom) and do the plot logarithmically, then the picture looks nearly like the vowel space(s) postulated by the 19th century phoneticians. That is there is a correspondence between high and low tongue position and "high" and "low" vowel sounds, and the same is true for "front" and "back". So telling students that e.g. French [i] is higher than Englisch [i] does make sense. The point is - as you have done at the beginning of the video that vowels come in gliding ranges and that students must readjust their vowel ranges to speak another language properly.

[@wingedarr0w]

Wow this is amazing, especially your clickable IPA vowel chart. I am trying to learn Hungarian from English, and plotting the vowels this way helps so much. Knowing that ű is like 'e in eat', and ő is like 'ei in eight' BUT with the tongue in a different place helps significantly, because we don't really have those sounds in English. I am also glad that you somehow decided to make videos and post them on youtube. In reality I would never get, or even be curious enough to go see a linguistics lecture, but on here I can learn about such an interesting topic basically in 20 minutes on the other side of the world.

[@leolucas6232]

I’ve thought about this concept for so many years. The idea of a 2-dimensional space where certain points equate to different vowels. This is awesome.

[@XGD5layer]

The historic chart did that to some degree by feel, this one just maps 'f1' and 'f2' qualities (and 'f3' for the 3d version)

[@Tynach]

I'd just like to correct one minor point about the chromaticity diagram: That's an 'xy' chromaticity diagram, based on the XYZ color matching functions. XYZ was first devised before they could determine exactly what the response curves for the three cone types were, so they ended up with an approximation that turns out to be a *linear combination* of the actual three cone cells' response curves. Because the 'Y' curve was calculated to map out how much each wavelength contributes to the perception of luminosity, XYZ is still commonly used because its analog for 'green' works very well as a quick way to calculate 'brightness' in linear space. However, if you want a chromaticity chart that has a nice 'U' shape that's not at a weird 45° angle, one can convert XYZ's color matching functions to the LMS space (which stands for 'Long, Medium, Short', and REALLY represents the amount each type of cone responds to each wavelengths) first, and then make an 'lm' chromaticity diagram. It's also worth noting that your three absolute primaries are Always going to lie outside of the range of physically possible values, because they absolutely Must contain all possible answers within the triangle they create. For example, in an 'xy' chromaticity diagram, the 'horseshoe' shape's boundary contains individual wavelengths, but all wavelengths are within x and y coordinates between 0 and 1, and the three primaries are located at (0, 0), (1, 0), and (0, 1). As a humorous aside, the actual chromaticity coordinates for the LMS space's primaries (as defined by CVRL data that forms the CIE's LMS standard), when charted on an xy chromaticity diagram instead of an lm chromaticity diagram, are (0.73840145, 0.26159855), (1.32671635, -0.32671635), and (0.15861916, 0.0) for L, M, and S, respectively. The presence of coordinates greater than 1.0, and negative coordinates, shows just how far off the XYZ space is from matching the cones' own actual spectral responses.

[@Tynach]

All of that said, I've been wondering about how to map out vowels in my head for YEARS, and been dissatisfied and confused by all the diagrams and whatnot I've seen until now. Having an understanding of colorspaces and chromaticity diagrams and whatnot, and having a 'vowel space' explained to me in a way that directly relates to that, is FANTASTIC. I don't know if it'd be helpful for most people, but it was certainly helpful to me! So thank you SO much for making this video.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Am I right that you're talking about the kind of diagram here? jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/colour/primary.html I used the CIE because it's easy to find and widely referenced on the internet. Not that I really know the details!

[@Tynach]

​@@DrGeoffLindsey Well jeez, I had planned to link to that exact page, but remembered that the last time I tried to link to an external site in a comment my comment would get deleted almost immediately, so decided not to. That's exactly the sort of thing I mean, yes! I'm amazed you found (or already knew about) that page. I ran into it only because I ran into that site when looking up stuff about black holes and worm holes, and that was several years ago. Though, in my own renderings on Shadertoy (I tried to link them just now, and the post got deleted; I think KZbin considers external links to be spam unless you're the uploader), I render it with a D65 whitepoint to stay true to the sRGB colorspace of the output. It's worth noting that the author of that page had trouble with the white point, but only because he didn't rescale the LMS values to treat (1, 1, 1) as the equal energy white point.. Though, to be fair, this DOES make the colors a little more balanced, and the 'U' shape less stretched. So this is merely personal preference. One thing that page does get wrong, is what it says about color blindness. The reason that protanopes don't see things in psychedelic aquamarine is because they aren't missing L ('red') cones; rather, their L cones have mutated to behave like M ('green') cones. The result is that they receive the same signal from both types of cones, rather than one being completely absent. However, this is a common misconception about color blindness, and it's actually a handy misconception when it comes to working out how to simulate color blindness, so it's not that big of a deal.

[@Tynach]

@@DrGeoffLindsey Oh yeah, one more little tidbit: CIE actually has two different standards for chromaticity charts. The other one is the "CIE u'v' Uniform Chromaticity Scale", and is produced by first performing some weirdly formed stretching and scaling operations to XYZ. It's meant to be more 'perceptually uniform'. Interestingly enough, while it too is rotated at about 45° (much like the xy chromaticity diagram), the resulting shape more closely resembles an lm diagram. I don't know if this is coincidence or not.

[@Jlaaag]

Incredible. Just a few days ago i was trying to come up with my own two-axis vowel map, not being satisfied with the one found on the Wikipedia page for the International Phonetic Alphabet. My best attempt was considering "up-down-ness" of the tongue and use as one axis, and "lips-with" as the other. A separate time i thought i had landed on the idea that Ah / Ee / Ooh were the three primary vowel sounds that can be mixed to form all the rest - seeing the space mapped on your graph is very satisfying to see. Now I'm considering approxmants and semi-vowels, Y and W, and wondering if they get any representation here. Awesome to see R included on this graph since I consider the sound might be deserving of vowel status.

[@matthewbartsh9167]

"Now I'm considering approxmants and semi-vowels, Y and W, and wondering if they get any representation here. " I second that.

[@elizabethfreed472]

This remains the best explanation of vowels I've ever heard, and I got my degree in Linguistics from a respected university. I come back and rewatch every few months. Thank you, Dr Geoff!!!

[@alexandrashvydun8726]

10:45 i love how going from /i/ to /u/ accentuates the natural overtones

[@twodollars4u]

Great, well written video on a very interesting subject. I remember reading about IPA's use of tongue position as the defining characteristic of vowel sounds and being confused that it didn't sound accurate. The formant system seems like a better way of explaining.

[@eljestLiv]

This video is fantastic. I never was able to figure out the four-sided vowel diagram, it always made more sense in my head as a triangle shape. Thanks for reassuring me that I had the right idea!

[@falquicao8331]

7:40 Small correction: only some dialects of Italian distinguish between open o and closed o. In other dialects, especially in the South, that difference disappears. I remember years ago hearing a debate between Northeners over the correct vowels to use in "loro" and "l'oro" which, to my southerner ear at the time, sounded exactly the same.

[@LeelooMinai]

It's interesting how a-u-a-i-u glide at 6:29 is interpreted by the brain (at least mine:) as "how are you" - it fills the missing sounds automatically to match the most probable phrase.

[@QDWhite]

Finally, it makes sense! So many books I’ve read just talk about “high vowels” and “low vowels” that are simply produced “high in the mouth” or “low in the mouth” but that gave me me no intuitive understanding about how one is different from another. I feel like you’ve finally answered the question I’ve been asking for years.

[@yura2424]

This channel is gold!

[@erikesswein4608]

This is something i noticed with throat signing, where you have to generate the overtone frequencies by gliding between vowels

[@EmblemParade]

Fascinating. My assumption has always been that every speaker figures out their own tongue-and-lip tactics to make sounds, which is why we all sound a bit different despite sharing a recongizable pronunciation type. Children are not taught how to talk, they do it through imitation and trial-and-error, so it seems inevitable to me that we must be somewhat idiosyncratic in our approach. I also don't think phonotactics can be ignored in any analysis, as glides and clusters provide the context for individual vowel sounds.

[@teshn1229]

I find it fascinating that we become attuned to, differentiate between and learn to reproduce different sounds with very similar parameters in English (and likewise for native speakers of other languages). I don't know if the research has been updated, but one example is voiced stops taking less than 30ms for the voicing to start, and voiceless stops taking greater than 30ms. (Kessinger & Blumstein, (1997), in Ballard, Maas & Robin, (2007)) (Forgive the (old) referencing 😅)

[@teshn1229]

In comment on your comment, the video is looking at vowels in isolation, in a 'pure' sense, although it could be useful to map vowels in a variety of consonant contexts. Although I've also been taught that sounds can impact more than the sounds that immediately surround them.

[@skyworm8006]

@@teshn1229 do vowels in isolation really exist except as a product of alphabets

[@teshn1229]

@@skyworm8006 from what I understand yes. I probably shouldn't have put the parentheses.

[@comradewindowsill4253]

@@skyworm8006 yeah, there's plenty of vowel-only words in a lot of languages. for example, russian /i/, means 'and'. and there's a few others, but those I'd need ipa symbols for. there's another 'and', for when there's a change of subject involved, then there's 'about'... these two have very similar but distinguishable A-like sounds. I'm sure that there's languages with longer words which are fully comprised of vowels, too.

[@AirKIng74]

Every time I see a new video by you I feel like I walk away with a new and more profound understanding of the way phonetics works. I clicked on this video the second I saw it and I'm glad I did, this will be extremely useful for the conlang I'm working on.

[@kmanz60]

I would pay to watch you interview an impressionist in a podcast format… super interesting stuff!

[@Skiddla]

wow, it would be amazing when learning a new language to be able to speak into a microphone and get feedback on the vowel sound frequency you make vs what your target frequency is. this would also be amazing for impressions of certain accents. powerful stuff

[@Bebeu4300]

I really think some of your approaches are much better than the normally used ones. Everything from an objective, data-based vowel chart to your more accurate list of english phonemes. I wish more people would embrace these, as a lot of things feel outdated, and as if you have to learn that it isn't what it seems like because the same system has been used for too long and is no longer accurate, or better technologies have come along.

[@teshn1229]

And surely it would be much easier to update the IPA than something like the English spelling system 😂

[@poahnfiap]

I'm curious if this vowel space covers all values in every language. For example I speak Portuguese which has nasal vowels- is nasality yet another dimension in that space or just a binary modifier?

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Great question, and not easy to answer simply (at least not by me). Nasalization affects not only resonant frequencies, but also the shape of the spectrum (roughly = the loudness of the different resonances) and the bandwidth of the resonances. Opening up the nasal cavity has the effect of damping (roughly, muffling) the resonances. Of course there were limits on what I thought I could cover here.

[@Unbrutal_Rawr]

Nasality is another articulatory-based descriptor, it means some of the airflow is directed through the nasal cavity by lowering the soft palate. Since the degree and timing of this opening can be modulated, nasality is not a binary modifier at all, and phoneticians sometimes talk about the former or the latter part of the vowel being nasalised, and degrees of nasality differing as well. Nasalising a vowel doesn't have a single fixed effect on the vowel, but modifies existing formant frequencies and adds new peaks, chaning the acoustic spectrum. The most noticeable effect is that nasalised vowels are acoustically centralised, especially on the vertical F1 axis.

[@poahnfiap]

Fascinating! Would love a video covering this more in depth. I'm sure like there are many rabbit holes in the vowel space you could delve into. Thanks for a great intro!

[@ferociousfeind8538]

5:25 petition to swap the red and green response axes, so we can call it "green" and then something like "rad"

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

The Japanese for red is "aka"! I was going to put it in the video, but I need to be succinct and meet deadlines...

[@shirou9790]

Finally I understand why e.g. [œ] and [ʌ] sound so similar to me, even though I thought they had to be drastically different according to the usual charts (the former being anterior with rounded lips, the latter being posterior with unrounded lips)!

[@shmoola]

Wow, thank you! I always thought it was a 3 dimensional space: 2 from tongue and 1 from lips. Having the chart displayed on the space with 2 frequencies makes a lot of sense.

[@sahidcm]

I'm a English teacher and this is really useful to me. I intend to reference it for when my students want to know more about vowel distribution in the charts, and understand vowel differentiation better. Brilliant! Thanks Dr. Geoff!!

[@kelcben]

Thanks! Love your expertise, rich and delightful videos, and the sense of humor threading through them. I've been fascinated by all this all my life (Enfield, UK, war bride mother, Newark, NJ, father). Although it's not a phonetic issue, I've often thought to ask you your view on double-is. Today I was reading "SMART Speech" and there it was (I admit I was dismayed to see). Page 42: "A corollary of this is, as I discussed in Chapter Two, is the expectation that..." It has always irked me a little and I suppose it will now do so a bit less. Congratulations and best wishes for your continued success.

[@franticranter]

It’s crazy that in typical phonetics teaching we’re still taught in terms of tongue position rather than formants. Presumably it’s easier to explain the typical IPA vowel charts that way, but that doesn’t make it accurate

[@hoi-polloi1863]

Hey Doc! I really like your vowel charts, your approach makes sense. I'd recommend you chart the vowel inventories of various languages on your chart and look at how the spacings fall out. I'm reminded of how languages with only three vowels tend to pick a,i,u at the very corners of the chart.

[@PC_Simo]

Yes; like Inuktitut. I guess they strive for maximal clarity 🤔.

[@cmyk8964]

I still find the vowel trapezoid useful in the same way as TAB score on a guitar sheet. It doesn’t represent the resulting formants, but it helps you learn what configuration of the noisemaking apparatus should make the correct formants.

[@whatisthisayoutubechannel]

Yeah, it’s not like we can manually adjust formants when we speak, so the traditional chart is better at helping production (and IMO easier for beginners to understand)

[@averynhiell]

This is so interesting, thank you! I have vowel-colour synaesthesia and the vowels are actually on a colour spectrum for me: [i] is red, [e] yellow, [ɛ] light yellow, [a] white, [ɑ] light grey, [ɔ] grey, [o] black, [u] dark blue, [y] purple. I also noticed that a great part of my vowel-colour associations are the same as shown at 6:55.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

I have a kind of synaesthesia between vowel *letters* and colours. For me, A/a is red, I/i is black, etc.

[@danielbriggs991]

Every once in a blue moon, a work of genius comes out. This video among them: not only for the clarity of the theory itself, but also for the clarity and succinctness with which it's presented.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Thank you!

[@resourceress7]

This is much clearer than the phonetics textbooks or explanations I ever received in linguistics classes. Thanks!

[@bten-pow2095]

Very informative and eye opening - thank you

[@davidskszp1408]

This has been the best introduction to Vowels ans Phonetics ever! You continue to amaze

[@TomLWaters]

Absolutely the best discussion of formants and articulatory positions I've ever heard.

[@elmukaltino]

Dr Lindsey, I discovered your channel couple of months ago and I’m hooked. You have such a gift of explaining phonetics in such an engaging and visual way! Definitely the best channel on the topic on KZbin. Every analogy you draw is just spot on! Watching this video I’m just astounded about the color space/vowel chart similarity that has never crossed my mind before even though I’m more than familiar with both concepts. Oh and your Russian pronunciation was flawless! Best of luck to you and your channel!

[@yura2424]

9:41 This is a very useful demonstration

[@rafaelarevalo8047]

a beautiful video dr. lindsey. may be the ultimate intro to vowel qualities. your channel is a blessing!

[@khananiel-joshuashimunov4561]

Sir, I have needed this video for many years, thank you so much for the clear explanation!

[@vladimir520]

Thank you SO much for shedding light on the topic of vowels, your video could not have come at a better time for me! I've been stuck for a couple weeks now on the first chapter of Ladegofed's Course in Phonetics, because I thought I didn't really get vowels and nothing sounded quite right for me, but now, seeing how difficult a problem vowel recognition is even for phoneticians, I feel like I can relax now and try to gain a better understanding through the use of modern technology, spectrograms and the like. Thank you again for your concise, documented and entertaining explanations on phonetics, your videos have been helping me a lot as of late!

[@thebouncyblob]

So cool to become aware of this "formant frequencies" way of looking at vowels. Thank you!

[@lilaclullaby]

Thank you for your efforts. I really struggle to hear the differences and this helps a lot.

[@eliotbaez]

Thank you for this video! I've been working on a voice synthesizer project and have been stuck looking for a way to understand how vowels are formed. This was a huge eye-opener in terms of a starting point for further research. The two-cylinders approximation of the vocal tract was especially fascinating. I'm definitely embarking on a rabbit hole of research after this.

[@drdca8263]

This is great! It reminds me of a question I have: If we used speech synthesis to make something that sounds like a vowel but where the 1st and 2nd formants are in a combination outside what can be comfortably made with one’s mouth, how weird would that sound?

[@notwithouttext]

new alien conlang phonology idea

[@comradewindowsill4253]

@@notwithouttext yeah, what sorts of formants would a creature with a vocal tract more like a bird's sound like? or just one with a much longer mouth or throat, even?

[@paper.trailing]

good grief.. it hasn't been THAT long since I finished uni, but Praat has come a LONG way.

[@PakiPicasso]

I can't believe the depth of knowledge available on the internet today. Thanks Doc!

[@stephanberger3476]

We are working on a new course book for non-Frisians to learn our language. We want to have some IPA in it, mainly because of the difference between two 'oh-sounds' where Dutch just has one. Your page will be of great help, thanks so much!

[@matthewbartsh9167]

Awesome vid. One of Dr. Lindsey's most meaty vids ever. There is *so* much here. Some of the technology referred to could be very useful to me in my hobby of coding educational audio files. I'm not very good at coding, so I might need help from a coder, or from AI. By a coincidence I have long been interested in both phonetics and the color sphere and so on. I never thought they could be linked, though. Liked and tweeted out, and I am going to watch this again, many times. I think I'll share it a couple more times, too. Thank you so much, Doctor.

[@janetmackinnon3411]

Fascinating! Tha analogy with colour is enlightening! Thank you.

[@vsm1456]

Thank you! The vowel space is such an easy to get concept.

[@StefanRotenberg]

Dr Geoff, you are the best. Seriously, you have taught me so much, and it feels so much more "scientific" when you say it than most of the instructions I've received or read in other places. Seriously, listening to you is like reading fine, clear prose.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Thanks so much, Stefan!

[@Horhne]

What a fantastically clear explanation! I consider myself a linguist and love to delve into new languages but constantly come up against the vowel sounds of a given language. I have tried researching linguistics but always found the charts to be incomplete leaving me with more questions than answers. I am delighted that my frustrations had some genuine basis; and now I have a greater insight into this area of linguistics. Thank you so much. By the way I am grappling with learning European Portuguese at the moment where the vowel sounds are very 'fluid' soo can relate very easily to your demonstration near the start of the video.

[@kkanden]

it's crazy how every video of yours delivers so much i love it

[@anj000]

You can find color palettes made on the basis of some particular image or series of images. Like it takes colors present on the image and compiles a set of for example 6 main colors present, or a set of colors scaled proportionally to amount of particular color on the image. I would love, LOVE, to see something like this but for languages. Take a language, make a palette of this language in vowel space and then convert it to color space. Some languages would be more red than others, others would be more saturated than other. I think it would be really cool.

[@nuri4825]

The vowel of upside down “m” is similar to the “eu” sound, 으 in Korean (Also present in Amharic and other languages) it’s when I was first introduced to the specific letter They also have 의 which is pronounced like the mix between u and i, or pronounced like “eh”

[@notwithouttext]

yeah it is, it's [u] but unrounded, and on his video on bts he shows how koreans can have a hard time saying [w] after a consonant becaue of this

[@lennih]

Spanish also has _azul_ - _celeste_ - _verde_ (three basic colour terms here). At least for an Argentinian, _celeste_ is to _azul_ as pink is to red. They're cousins, but a different basic colour.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

It depends on what you count as basic. 'Celeste' is a lot less frequent and has another meaning, e.g. cuerpo celeste.

[@lennih]

@@DrGeoffLindsey Yes, BCT are always tricky to define. I've just compared ngrams for 'celeste' and 'azul' in Spanish, and 'pink' and 'red' in English, and the frequency ratio is identical. 'Rosa' in Spanish also has another meaning, but that doesn't stop it from being a BCT in my opinion. To my mind, 'celeste' is not a shade of blue, it's one of the colours I learnt as a toddler, way before I learnt what 'cuerpo celeste' meant.

[@Unbrutal_Rawr]

@@lennih This is a very nice observation, especially the part about "rosa". Many, if not most colour terms start out like that, via metonymy from an object that typically has this colour (orange is a prime recent example).

[@stephaniemacchi5598]

Yeah, in Argentine Spanish, 'celeste' is like a completely different colour than 'azul' and is a basic word (perhaps in other variants of Spanish, everything is thought of a shades of 'azul')

[@rolandayers6726]

@@DrGeoffLindsey Celeste is frequently seen in the peloton. It's the signature colour of Bianchi bicycles.

[@BlueDog15391]

That was very enlightening! I also think the video have helped me to fix my pronunciation of some vowels I struggled with before.

[@telescoper]

Wow! In 20 minutes, for the first time ever, I understand vowels AND color space! Brilliant!

[@vaheakli4551]

Thanks! At 15:08 I thought that more dimensional representation would be more accurate, and then you showed one like that 🥰 Also, that situation with "blue" in english was very confusing for me for a very long time. When I learned how colours named for the first time I considered "Blue" being that one in the corner and struggled with it. Starting from not understanding why different words for different colours translated the same, and later with something like "what colour do you mean? so why you name it with the name of different one?!" :( Moment in the video wasn't already groundbreaking for my mind, but it was shown greatly. Had never actually thinked about it.

[@omargoodman2999]

I wonder, given how much similarity there is between vowel sounds and colors, and given how we know that there is, objectively, a distinct order by which a group will organize and give names to color groups, might there also be a similar order for development and differentiation of vowel sounds? For those who don't know the basic concept, the first names a society give to colors are always "light colors", "dark colors", followed by "red colors" (which will include oranges, reddish purples, lighter reddish browns, deeper pinks, etc.). The next group to get a name will either be "yellowish" colors (including yellowish oranges, yellowish greens, and lighter yellowish browns) _or_ "green-blue" colors; and whichever gets named first, the other group will get named next. So, at this point, a language with only five basic color terms has words for "light colors" (eg. white), "dark colors" (eg. black), "long wavelength colors" (eg. red), and two words for medium wavelength colors, longer medium (eg. yellow) and shorter medium (eg. blue or green). The next color to get added will be for short wavelength colors, a distinct term for blue, but it will be deeper blues closer to indigo because the original term that may have obliquely referred to both blues and greens was more "cyan and azure" type lighter blues rather than the blues closer to the purple end of the spectrum. Next will be Brown which is really just a distinct term for "dark reds/oranges", and after that it's just a gradual, more open process of more specific terms for light or dark versions of the basic colors, usually following the original color order (eg. brown for dark red/orange, pink for light red, gray/grey ('a' for America, 'e' for England; btw, handy mnemonic) for half-way between light and dark, etc.). And this pattern has even been modeled in AI simulations and will emerge on its own when several AI are given a chart of colors and the task to discuss and mutually agree on names for the different swatches of color in the chart. They must either come up with an original name for a given color and agree on what the name should be, or agree to include the color under the umbrella of one of the existing names they've already created. And this basic pattern will reliably emerge when they run the simulations. So I'm wondering if the vowel space societally develops in a similar way? Will they start with the "black and white" vowel sounds in the middle along with a "red" sound for the spread lipped, short f1/long f2 vowel "i" (which would be a broad sort of vowel that encompasses that whole sort of "corner" of the space). Then either an "a" or an "o" sound for "yellow" or "green/light blues", followed by the other. And finally, the "u" and darker "i" sounds to complete the most core 7-sound picture of the complete vowel space (since "i" is naturally "higher/brighter" than others, needing a "darker" version makes sense). After that, any additional vowel sounds would either be holdovers from older pronunciations or irregular pronunciations as a result of "lazy-tongue".

[@comradewindowsill4253]

@@omargoodman2999 main issue is, this doesn't quite parallel. most 3 vowel languages have a, i, u... and a blue/green distinction is not something that happens in 3-color languages.

[@charlesgaskell5899]

Coming from a musical background, is f1 and f2 the fundamental (lowest) pitch and most prominent (loudest?) overtone? And if so, what is f3? I presume that these overtones / resonances are not harmonic (i.e. not integer multiples of the fundamental) - or are they? As a topic for a future video, it would be great for you to give an explanation of what technology such as Izotope's RX software is able to do. Another topic could be the impact of tonal languages on vowel sounds, and how sung speech differs from spoken speech (and what is Sprechstimme 😀 )

[@matthewbartsh9167]

+1 "how sung speech differs from spoken speech " Me also. OTOH, I don't think tone affects vowels, does it?

[@matthewbartsh9167]

"As a topic for a future video, it would be great for you to give an explanation of what technology such as Izotope's RX software is able to do. " What is that?

[@matthewbartsh9167]

@@gregoryford2532 "The vocal cords vibrate at roughly the same frequency throughout speech, but the formants can go up or down significantly." Really? Do have a citation?

[@HalfgildWynac]

@@matthewbartsh9167 you can just use this sound and get it into Praat. You can easily see F2 go up to twice the initial frequency: drive.google.com/file/d/1Y1aHMSY6ZPHJBFtWFRcilbk8GQB8yES7/view?usp=share_link

[@caboose202ful]

F0 is the fundamental. Formants in vowels are actually incredibly steady even when the fundamental changes. I have no idea why, but I just measured it with praat! I was going look at a 'chipmunked' recording of myself (sped up 3x) in praat too, but as soon as I listened back to it, it sounded clearly like a very different vowel! I highly recommend trying for yourself, even if you do believe me!

[@Makkeraad]

Amazing work! I love the comparison with the color spectrum.

[@EstebanGarciaAlonso]

Absolutely brilliant!!! Best explanation ever about the most obscure subject!!!!

[@nevenvillani8395]

Wow, that was fascinating. I'm curious, where do the nasal vowels fit in here, do they need the third dimension ? Can this justify (or disprove) that they are said to be nasalized versions of other vowels ? (e.g. Wikipedia lists [ɔ̃] of the French "on" as "nasalized [o]", is this reflected in their proximity in this chart ?)

[@notwithouttext]

well now that needs the nose, but i also wonder what happens to the frequency

[@WaterShowsProd]

He did mention there was a fourth formant, but didn't go into it. That could be it.

[@caboose202ful]

I've just had a quick look in praat iwth a vowel near [ɔ], and I could feel the back of my tongue moving slightly with my velum. The first and second formants were ever so slightly closer together when nasal, but the higher formants were all much lower - to the point that the 4th formant when nasal is at the same height as the 3rd formant when not nasal. Very interesting!