A wonderful lesson in IPA with great examples! I've seen this careful attention to details pay off in extraordinary sounds coming from Austin's high school singers as well as his new ensemble, Essere! θeɪŋk ju ɑstɪn!
This is great and very relevant to my Master research. Thank you for placing this online. A detail I missed was that some diacritics could help in clarifying some of the ambiguities one can run into when using an IPA transcription. In the case of the sound in between [e] and [ɛ], one could use diacritics like ̝or ̞ to indicate a vowel being raised or lowered (i.e. more closed or more open, respectively). That could then result in [ɛ̝] or [e̞]. In fact, officially, instead of writing [e / ɛ], one *should* write [ɛ̝] or [e̞], as square brackets are generally reserved for what is known as a "narrow transcription". In general, less detailed IPA transcriptions should be surrounded by forward slashes to indicate a broad transcription. (E.g. "cool" is [kʰul] or /kul/.) Of course this is nitpicking, and most of these diacritics are needless complications for an IPA transcription for singers. In general, I try to stick to placing my transcriptions between slashes, though some diacritics really help me in pronunciation details, like the abovementioned ʰ. (The amount of simplification of the IPA and perhaps its diacritics for singers is something I intend to base my Master research on, though I'm still working on the exact research question.)
A wonderful lesson in IPA with great examples! I've seen this careful attention to details pay off in extraordinary sounds coming from Austin's high school singers as well as his new ensemble, Essere! θeɪŋk ju ɑstɪn!
This is great and very relevant to my Master research. Thank you for placing this online.
A detail I missed was that some diacritics could help in clarifying some of the ambiguities one can run into when using an IPA transcription. In the case of the sound in between [e] and [ɛ], one could use diacritics like ̝or ̞ to indicate a vowel being raised or lowered (i.e. more closed or more open, respectively). That could then result in [ɛ̝] or [e̞].
In fact, officially, instead of writing [e / ɛ], one *should* write [ɛ̝] or [e̞], as square brackets are generally reserved for what is known as a "narrow transcription". In general, less detailed IPA transcriptions should be surrounded by forward slashes to indicate a broad transcription. (E.g. "cool" is [kʰul] or /kul/.)
Of course this is nitpicking, and most of these diacritics are needless complications for an IPA transcription for singers. In general, I try to stick to placing my transcriptions between slashes, though some diacritics really help me in pronunciation details, like the abovementioned ʰ.
(The amount of simplification of the IPA and perhaps its diacritics for singers is something I intend to base my Master research on, though I'm still working on the exact research question.)