Vocal Tract, Live

Vocal Tract, Live.

Click a phoneme to watch the tongue, lips, and velum move into position and hear a real recording. Drag the round handle on the tongue body to explore the vowel space freely — the shape you make is synthesized into sound in real time, the same source–filter idea as A buzz and a tube.

Recordings: single words from CMU ARCTIC speaker ksp (Indian-English male, 16 kHz), © Carnegie Mellon University (J. Kominek and A. W. Black); cut, faded and peak-normalised for this site by data/make_clips.py. The drawings are schematic; the recordings are one speaker's real pronunciation, which differs from American English in places (noted per sound).

air in the vocal tracttonguenarrowest point oral airflow / drag handle nasal airflow turbulence (frication)

Vowels

Consonants (by manner)

Currently showing

/ə/

neutral

Click any phoneme button to see and hear its articulation.

Free explore — hear the tongue move

Drag the round handle on the tongue body. \(F_1\) (tongue height) and \(F_2\) (tongue frontness) update live and drive a synthesized vowel — the same sawtooth-source-plus-resonant-filters model as the main tutorial's vowel chart.

\(F_1\) — — Hz · \(F_2\) — — Hz