Given that many physiological, emotional, and psychic effects are experienced by both the intoner and the listener when these vowel sounds are produced, the frequency characteristics of such sounds may lead to correlations that reveal the cause of their health-producing effects. Certain Rosicrucian vowel sound intonations, which are shared by other traditions, were pre-recorded in a recording studio and analyzed. This unique study investigates the frequency spectrum of certain Rosicrucian vowel chants using PRAAT (Boersma 2001, 341-345) software and analysis. The results of the acoustic analysis encompassed in this article, hope to provide quantitative acoustic data on a limited scale regarding the formant structure of the Setswana vowels in order to assess the present perceptual descriptions of these vowels. Choi (1991:4) summarizes the traditional articulatory approach fittingly as follows: ”While such descriptions are valuable, they are nonetheless qualitative, and ideally, should be complemented by instrumental examination. The vowels are positioned on the vowel chart according to their auditory qualities and those of the cardinal vowels. The vowel system of Setswana consists of seven vowels and four raised variants of the mid vowels. The data presented in this article should lead to a more scientific description and presentation of the Setswana vowels. To improve this situation, an acoustic study was carried out. Due to the lack of scientific evidence to support these descriptions, many discrepancies exist that were transferred to the vowel charts as well. Descriptions of the Setswana vowels as found in textbooks and other sources are mainly articulatory in nature and are based on auditive perceptions. This article aims at the presentation of data recovered from an acoustic analysis of the vowels of Setswana (S31), a Bantu language spoken in Botswana, the North Western, Northern Cape and Gauteng provinces of South Africa. This document has been updated to include a second Praat script that displays the formants of vowels in Praat's visualization window. The script used in the final section has been modified from an original script by Bert Remijsen (2004) for the author's personal research. The sound files used here are from the author's research into the Pnar language of the Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya, India. It is by no means comprehensive and users of this guide are expected to pursue questions raised by the exercises via other channels, particularly published phonetics and phonology papers that use Praat to deal with issues found in languages of the world. It is intended merely as an introduction and assumes a working knowledge of phonetics and phonology. This guide was initially developed in 2011 to accompany a workshop on Praat for students of the North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, when I was a PhD Student at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
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