Want to find tone frequency (Hz) for language project

[chrisnicolaisen]

Audacity Windows 2.1.0

Windows 8.1

I am currently trying to determine the frequency in (Hz) of vowel sounds in American English and Japanese for a linguistics project.

I want to use the (Hz) reading to find corresponding musical notes (C, D, etc.) .

I am attaching a screenshot and the 3.5 second audio file.

I explored the drop down folders, tips, tutorials, and the forums, but I did not find an answer. I think this is probably a simple problem, it is just difficult to find the solution because of how many results pop up from the search criteria.

Thank you very much in advance, and I think Audacity is amazing software!

CN

[kozikowski]

I think this is probably a simple problem

Nope. Hard problem. Each mouth sound is made of hundreds of different tones, overtones and harmonics. Voices and instruments are all like that. That's why someone who wants to filter out all the French Horns from the orchestra by tones and frequencies is probably not going to be very happy. The horns share a lot of those tones with other instruments.

Koz

[chrisnicolaisen]

Thanks, should I just try to use a guitar tuner then?

[kozikowski]

If it works. The tuner is looking for a powerful fundamental tone and much weaker harmonics on an instrument, so it's easy to see it working. Voices aren't like that unless they're singing.

Koz

[chrisnicolaisen]

I'm definitely open to any suggestions you might have on the best way to get a good reading. Thanks a bunch,

[Trebor]

I am currently trying to determine the frequency in (Hz) of vowel sounds in American English and Japanese for a linguistics project.

I want to use the (Hz) reading to find corresponding musical notes (C, D, etc.) .

I am attaching a screenshot and the 3.5 second audio file.

That screenshot is a waveform display. If you select spectrogram display it shows the frequency-content in multi colours ...

same sound in waveform & spectrogram display.png (180.78 KiB) Viewed 528 times

[chrisnicolaisen]

Excellent! Thank you so much for your help, I really appreciate it!