Pitch range
1. Intonation and pitch are two of the most important elements in effective speaking. Spoken English too, like any other language, depends vastly on them. Having a good knowledge of that and an intuitional usage of these in communication would ensure the utmost fluency in the language and, in turn, the listeners would understand you more easily.
Pitch is one of the very crucial elements of speech in any language. Without the right pitch and intonation, it becomes almost impossible to convey the intended messages on-point. In the English language precisely, if the right intonation and pitch range are not ensured, the meaning and manner of speech can not be pinpointed most of the time. That causes unnecessary misunderstandings and uncalled-for situations. Lack of the right pitch would always confuse both the speaker and the listener equally.
Definition of Pitch
Pitch is the vocal element that determines the accentuation and prominence of speech. It is similarly significant in the individual word or full sentence level. The normal pitch of any voice depends on the vocal cord at play and in what frequency it vibrates. The frequency of the vocal cord’s vibration is solely dependent on the length, thickness, and tension.
Martha Pennington states in her book titled, Phonology In English Language Teaching: An International Approach, that somebody’s average pitch level is determined by the size of the vocal cords. Men have longer vocal cords compared to women and children, and so men’s vocal pitch tends to be lower or deeper in general.
Individual Pitch Range
Apart from having an average pitch or modal pitch, every individual has a set pitch range at their disposal. The pitch range can be achieved or altered by making adjustments to the strength of one’s vocal cord. With some exercises, musicians can make planned adjustments to their voices, although most would just work on expanding their natural vocal range, which involves extending the highest and lowest pitch they are able to sing at.
For effective speaking too, one has to practice similar adjustments to their vocal cords but at a bare minimum compared to the musicians, of course. To raise the pitch of one’s voice, the vocal cords or folds must tighten. Lowering the pitch would mean loosening the vocal cords for that matter. With the changing of the tension in the vocal cords, the pitch variations in speech are realized. When the right amount of variations are present, the speech becomes more meaningful and accurate to the listeners.
Pitch Explained with Examples
The vibration of the vocal cords is the basis of the change in pitch. The increase in the vibration of the vocal folds means that the pitch climbs with it. Normally, the pitch range of an average person remains inside the 70 Hz to 200 Hz mark.
In the case of everyday speech, the pitch range of the utterance denotes the attitude of the speaker towards the information or the listener in front. The neutral, unmarked, mid-pitch is the speaker’s modal pitch, and it conveys the simple-neutral manner that the statement is delivered in.
2. Pitch is a vital part of speaking and listening in most world languages. English is one such language in which meaning changes with the tone and intonation of the speech. Pitch matters both at the level of individual words and at the level of longer statements. I will focus on pitch and the functions of the pitch range in utterances in this article because this aspect of language can cause some problems in both speaking and listening.
3.Pitch range is currently characterised in a number of different ways across research disciplines, and is often treated as a simple measurement. Pitch range has been defined as the difference between minimum and maximum FO (Confides, 1983). This data alone conveys no information about the distribution of the values within that range. Similarly, the mean and standard deviation does not adequately capture important differences in the pitch range of different speakers (Ladd et al. 1985). Ladd (1996) describes pitch range using two partially independent dimensions of variation, that of overall level and span. This idea has been further developed by Scriber et al. (1996), in a study based on a large corpus of Dutch speech. Given this two parameter model, it is possible to predict target to values for when speakers raise their voices from the values at corresponding locations in speech produced normally. This thesis reports on three studies of pitch range variation across speakers. The experiments examine the relation between a two-dimensional model of pitch range based on pitch level and pitch span with the perception of various speaker characteristics. The key to our measure of pitch range is that it is based on average data taken from clearly defined linguistic targets in speech. These targets included sentence-initial peaks, accent peaks, post-accent valleys and sentence-final lows. The results show that a pitch range model based on linguistic dimensions of variation better captures variation in listeners' judgements than the well established measures based on speakers' long term distributional properties of the such as 4 standard deviations around the mean, 95th-5th percentile and 90th-10th percentile. Most importantly, this thesis shows that pitch range can and should be treated as the same entity across various research disciplines: extralinguistic, paralinguistic and linguistic rather than the current situation in which pitch range has multiple definitions depending on the particular interest of the respective research discipline.
What is Pitch? Explained with examples. Learn English.(n.d.).https://bit.ly/3SFP8ZW
Patterson, D. (2000). Linguistic approach to pitch range modelling.ttps://bit.ly/3HDZBP6h
Esen, S. (2023, October 30). Pitch in English Pronunciation: definition and examples. Owlcation.https://bit.ly/3Oox046