I was so frustrated trying to find a video that explained formants, and no video I found gave an actual definition or explanation of what a formant was. Even if others could define it, I need to see the actual science behind it. I need to understand how it applies to actual speech, not just in theory. In the literal first 10 seconds, you defined it, AND explained it, something NO ONE ELSE could do. Thanks from a speech therapy and audiology student!
Dude whispering = passing noise through formant filters is mindblowing and is a perfect way to drive the point that the formant is independent from the pitch of the sound. Thank you so much for this video!
This is by far the best video I've found on youtube explaining formants. It also explains to me how in the Jonny Depp Willy Wonka movie, they managed to make some of the oompa loomps sound like a very small person with a deep voice. That's how I'll think of it from now on, formant is like adjusting the size of the person, lower formant, bigger person, higher formant, smaller person. It's a good concept to keep in mind, because I raised the pitch up, and lowered the formant and it sounded like a giant woman. whereas if you raise the formant, and lower the pitch, like I said it sounds like the oompa loompas that were 2 feet tall but had really deep voices.
@@8thlvlMage I think you're taking the concept too literally. I'm sure there are big Amazonian women out there that are over 6 feet tall and weigh 230 lbs. and still have little girly mouse voices. But when I'm adjusting the pitch and formant of something it really helps me to just think in terms of small with a deep voice, small with a high voice, big with a deep voice, big with a high voice, etc. I picture a female ogre being big with a high voice, or perhaps a strong little elf with a beard having a very small deep voice.
Because of the high singing formants, the type of the singer's voice can be accurately determined. Frequency of typical high singing formants and voice type: 3500 Hz Soprano 3200 Hz Mezzo-soprano 3000 Hz Contralto 2700 Hz Tenor 2500 Hz Baritone 2300 Hz Bass It happens that a singer can have several high singing formants. Then the voice acquires a higher timbre "than it should be". For example, a contralto (typical HSF 3000 Hz) with an additional HSF 3500 Hz and above will sound like a soprano by ear, but in terms of pitch characteristics (range, register transitions) and frequencies, this is a real contralto ...
As a newly found bass singer, I think you’re on to something. I’ve been going through singers, in effort to find other bass voices, and it’s weird that a lot of voices sound deeper than mine, but the pitches they’re singing are higher than what I’m singing.
What really helped me understand formants was in the context of pitch shifting. Making a distorted sound and then shifting the formants back to something normal is a fun experiment to try.
This was a super useful explanation! Very clearly demonstrated and in many different ways. A concept I could hear but did not understand how it worked or how to manipulate it.
Im not the only one to say this but absolutely the best tutorial on RUclips! a lot of the times RUclipsrs try to come off as these all knowing Gods and the important info gets lost in their explanation. this was just great.
Started listening to this confused as heck! Now I finally get what I was trying to understand in the first place, which was formant shifting. Thanks so much! I got everything I needed to know out of this and more.
This is a resonance phenomenon. Sounds are "colored" by overtones (harmonics). Only again the mystery has not been revealed: why the most harmonious ("euphonious") intervals are those whose frequencies correlate like small numbers. 2: 1 is an octave, 3: 2 is a fifth, 4: 3 is a fourth, 5: 4 is a major third, 6: 5 is a minor third, 8: 5 is a minor sixth, 5: 3 is a major sixth.
Damn, there's so much possibility in this when it comes to mixing. Not a new idea, but definitely a new light. Glad I happened across this. Appreciate the topic's presentation. HNY
I whole heartedly thank you so much for creating this video. I am studying Melodyne Vocal Plugin & it has a Formant Changing tool. I am very satisfied with the knowledge you shared. God Bless You.
Wow this video is awesome, and has inspired me to do more research. I’m a dubstep producer, so I’m always making vocal sounding synth basses. I do this by essentially taking a synthesised sound (usually something a bit noisy/aggressive) and filter it, in a variety of ways, targeting and boosting/removing certain frequencies and then ‘programming’ these filters to move to sound a little bit like speech. It’s one of my favourite things to do, but I never truly understood why that worked until now. Thanks heaps! Same phenomenon with the wah wah pedal on guitar
An incredible video. Should have way more views. It’s a shame videos about creating 808’s that sound like every other song out there have more views than content like this. Thank you!
2:33 and 3:55 shows that regions around 100 and 200 Hz are not changing despite uttering different vowels. This implies that they should not be taken as "formants". These regions are rather due to the source, not because of the vocal tract. My question of interest is, "How do we pick F1 from all these peaks". To me it seems that we will have to first, manually analyze several "different vowels" spectrograms to get to know peaks that are NOT formants, just by looking at the peaks that are not changing for all the spectrograms. Second, manually analyze "same vowel" spectrograms and check for the peaks that are not changing (excluding those found during first analysis) for all the same-vowel spectrograms. The unchanging peaks in second analysis, must be the F1, F2 and so on (for that vowel alone).
Excellent explanation. I've wanted to get that Daft Punk formant sound (that was apparently done with a Digitech Bass Synth Wah), I will give EQ automation a try, and maybe get to learn what frequencies make various vowels in the process.
@@seanthomasmartin2184 Yes they used vocoders a lot and certainly are associated with that sound, the sound I was meaning to refer to was the bassline such as: ruclips.net/video/D8K90hX4PrE/видео.html has that "Yai, yai" sound.. I'm pretty sure that's formant going from Y to A to I. Yes, programming the automation will be painstakingly slow and there are faster ways (such as the bass synth wah pedal I think they used), but manual somehow sounds fun and interesting to me, your video definitely gave me some insight to this.
@@tjn0110 Ah! Now I know what sound you're talking about- you're totally right! I've chased that sound for a while myself, I had some success with using a very resonant bandpass filter and then a bitcrusher (I think at about 2khz). Now that I think about it, that bandpass filter is very formant like... Also I totally get wanting to do it manually, you learn a lot doing things that way. Good luck!
Formants are natural 'chords' (frequencies) that the voice makes . Like piano chords, *formant frequencies* have specific and consistent interval lengths between them that aid the identification of them regardless of where they fall on the spectrogram.
I think you're confusing formants for overtones/harmonics. There is a set of intervals between overtones (the harmonic series) that stays the same no matter where they fall on the spectrogram- like you said. Formants are ranges of frequencies where overtones are amplified, not the overtones themselves.
Thank you for this very helpful explanation. Do you have the possibility to compare the formants of two voices, recorded in very different situations, and establish if the two individuals are related to each other. I have read some academic articles that explain the hereditarity of the voice apparatus and, then, of some aspects of the voice.
It is true that related people have voices that sound similar, and that no doubt has to do with similarly shaped vocal tracts- and therefore formants. However, I doubt that the shape of two peoples' vocal tracts alone could be enough to establish relationship, let alone two peoples' characteristic formants, which can be manipulated by the speaker. An interesting thought though! Perhaps an AI would be able to identify relationships between people through their voices some day...
Great video. Two questions: 1) what kind of waveform/preset did you use on the synth? 2) In the second formant pair should the distance be the same absolute or relative (200-600 -> 2000-2400 or 2000-6000)?
Sean, KUDOS on one of the best explanations of vocal formants on the Internet! I have a song sung by a male quartet on an mp3. Can you tell me how to change the formants and raise the pitch a fourth to make the singers sound like females?
I was so frustrated trying to find a video that explained formants, and no video I found gave an actual definition or explanation of what a formant was. Even if others could define it, I need to see the actual science behind it. I need to understand how it applies to actual speech, not just in theory. In the literal first 10 seconds, you defined it, AND explained it, something NO ONE ELSE could do. Thanks from a speech therapy and audiology student!
Very happy to have been so helpful for you :)
Dude whispering = passing noise through formant filters is mindblowing and is a perfect way to drive the point that the formant is independent from the pitch of the sound. Thank you so much for this video!
This is by far the best video I've found on youtube explaining formants. It also explains to me how in the Jonny Depp Willy Wonka movie, they managed to make some of the oompa loomps sound like a very small person with a deep voice. That's how I'll think of it from now on, formant is like adjusting the size of the person, lower formant, bigger person, higher formant, smaller person. It's a good concept to keep in mind, because I raised the pitch up, and lowered the formant and it sounded like a giant woman. whereas if you raise the formant, and lower the pitch, like I said it sounds like the oompa loompas that were 2 feet tall but had really deep voices.
DUDE! This is inspiring, never tought about it in these terms
This doesn't explain Peter Dinklage at all, for example. Everyone has their own voice despite size.
@@8thlvlMage I think you're taking the concept too literally. I'm sure there are big Amazonian women out there that are over 6 feet tall and weigh 230 lbs. and still have little girly mouse voices. But when I'm adjusting the pitch and formant of something it really helps me to just think in terms of small with a deep voice, small with a high voice, big with a deep voice, big with a high voice, etc. I picture a female ogre being big with a high voice, or perhaps a strong little elf with a beard having a very small deep voice.
Insightful & illustrative way to put it. Thanks!
@@TenthElementGraphics this went even further and beyond with the explanation lol
Marvelously clarifying demonstration of formants. Thank you!!
did not expect sudden comedy gold towards the end. also thanks. now i know how to make a homunculus inside ableton's analog synth.
I'm doing a research on linguistics and this is the best video on formants i've seen so far, helped me a lot! Thanks!!
I've been in the audio field for 8 years now and all of this is new to me. All of it. I've learned so much. Thanks
What have you been doing for 8 years?
How 💀💀
@@kewtomrao Forreal
Because of the high singing formants, the type of the singer's voice can be accurately determined. Frequency of typical high singing formants and voice type:
3500 Hz Soprano
3200 Hz Mezzo-soprano
3000 Hz Contralto
2700 Hz Tenor
2500 Hz Baritone
2300 Hz Bass
It happens that a singer can have several high singing formants. Then the voice acquires a higher timbre "than it should be". For example, a contralto (typical HSF 3000 Hz) with an additional HSF 3500 Hz and above will sound like a soprano by ear, but in terms of pitch characteristics (range, register transitions) and frequencies, this is a real contralto ...
This is really interesting and helpful. Could you point me to a source for this?
As a newly found bass singer, I think you’re on to something. I’ve been going through singers, in effort to find other bass voices, and it’s weird that a lot of voices sound deeper than mine, but the pitches they’re singing are higher than what I’m singing.
What really helped me understand formants was in the context of pitch shifting. Making a distorted sound and then shifting the formants back to something normal is a fun experiment to try.
When you came to whispering, it clicked in my head... It is so clear now!
And now I understand how a lot of the features on the Infected Mushroom Manipulator plug-in works. Thanks!
One of the The Best RUclips Videos I Have Ever Watched
This was a super useful explanation! Very clearly demonstrated and in many different ways. A concept I could hear but did not understand how it worked or how to manipulate it.
Im not the only one to say this but absolutely the best tutorial on RUclips! a lot of the times RUclipsrs try to come off as these all knowing Gods and the important info gets lost in their explanation. this was just great.
best video around about this topic. great job
Started listening to this confused as heck! Now I finally get what I was trying to understand in the first place, which was formant shifting. Thanks so much! I got everything I needed to know out of this and more.
I see people finding this video useful in different domains, this is fascinating. I found it mind opening also, thank you a lot!
Vocal tracts on vocal tracks! Thanks for the explanation, great upload 👍
This is a resonance phenomenon. Sounds are "colored" by overtones (harmonics). Only again the mystery has not been revealed: why the most harmonious ("euphonious") intervals are those whose frequencies correlate like small numbers. 2: 1 is an octave, 3: 2 is a fifth, 4: 3 is a fourth, 5: 4 is a major third, 6: 5 is a minor third, 8: 5 is a minor sixth, 5: 3 is a major sixth.
Holy shit how have I never known about this?! I've been a producer for years and never seen this. This is awesome, thank you!
Thanks from Empalme, Sonora, México.
Now I know why Daft Punk was in my recommended after I looked this up. Thank you!
Wth to me tooo......coincidence???
Perfect explanation. I being an engineer, I really love to learn singing by understanding at technical level.
Damn, there's so much possibility in this when it comes to mixing. Not a new idea, but definitely a new light. Glad I happened across this. Appreciate the topic's presentation. HNY
Awesome explanation
Genius. Thank you so much for explaining everything so clearly.
dude made a banger tutorial and then left
anyway super well explained, thanks for this video!!
I whole heartedly thank you so much for creating this video. I am studying Melodyne Vocal Plugin & it has a Formant Changing tool. I am very satisfied with the knowledge you shared. God Bless You.
Dude you explained it so well, and I laughed so so hard at the end when you kept explaining things demonstrating them with da vocoder on
The formant video to end all formant videos!!!
This is great!
So cool youre explained it so well and interestingly
Really good explanation.
Excellent Demo and Explanation !!
Wow this video is awesome, and has inspired me to do more research. I’m a dubstep producer, so I’m always making vocal sounding synth basses. I do this by essentially taking a synthesised sound (usually something a bit noisy/aggressive) and filter it, in a variety of ways, targeting and boosting/removing certain frequencies and then ‘programming’ these filters to move to sound a little bit like speech. It’s one of my favourite things to do, but I never truly understood why that worked until now. Thanks heaps! Same phenomenon with the wah wah pedal on guitar
Glad to shed some light! I definitely think about formants sometimes when I’m synthesizing.
Oops! Replied from my other account by accident haha... d3maniac is also me. Again, glad you liked the video!
keep it up!!! check out Noisia & Former - Cleansing. wonderful use of vowel sounds in the genre!
Great demonstration
Brilliant explanation, thanks
Awesome vid man. Anyone else absolutely die when he fired up the vocoder?
Very good explanation! I’ve been singing for quite a while but finally trying to understand this concept and this helped a lot. Thank you!
Really good video
Great Explanation Buddy 👍😀
Absolutely brilliant video. Perfectly simple and informative.
Exactly what I was looking for and very informative, even taught me more about vocoding!
An incredible video. Should have way more views. It’s a shame videos about creating 808’s that sound like every other song out there have more views than content like this. Thank you!
2:33 and 3:55 shows that regions around 100 and 200 Hz are not changing despite uttering different vowels. This implies that they should not be taken as "formants". These regions are rather due to the source, not because of the vocal tract.
My question of interest is, "How do we pick F1 from all these peaks". To me it seems that we will have to first, manually analyze several "different vowels" spectrograms to get to know peaks that are NOT formants, just by looking at the peaks that are not changing for all the spectrograms. Second, manually analyze "same vowel" spectrograms and check for the peaks that are not changing (excluding those found during first analysis) for all the same-vowel spectrograms. The unchanging peaks in second analysis, must be the F1, F2 and so on (for that vowel alone).
Fantastic demonstration, thanks a lot!
This explanation was eye opening. Thanks :)
Damn this is soooo good! I'm so happy it was the first search result, otherwise I would've wasted my time :D Thank you, Sean!
Thanks for the explanation with graphs and physics.
Well, that was a really good explanation. So simple to understand. Thanks!
Learned a huge amount, thank you do much!
Awesome explanation, thank you so much!
Really good explanation. 20/10.
Upload more shit dawg. You're great at explaining things without any trivial bullshit between
Incredible video. Thank you! 🙏
Thanks for this video, very clear! Greetings from Buenos Aires.
Really great video! Fascinating and the best explanation of Formants I've seen. Thank You!
Excellent explanation. I've wanted to get that Daft Punk formant sound (that was apparently done with a Digitech Bass Synth Wah), I will give EQ automation a try, and maybe get to learn what frequencies make various vowels in the process.
Thanks! I would recommend a vocoder for the daft punk voice, which is effectively EQ automation, but you don't have to do it manually.
@@seanthomasmartin2184 Yes they used vocoders a lot and certainly are associated with that sound, the sound I was meaning to refer to was the bassline such as: ruclips.net/video/D8K90hX4PrE/видео.html has that "Yai, yai" sound.. I'm pretty sure that's formant going from Y to A to I. Yes, programming the automation will be painstakingly slow and there are faster ways (such as the bass synth wah pedal I think they used), but manual somehow sounds fun and interesting to me, your video definitely gave me some insight to this.
@@tjn0110 Ah! Now I know what sound you're talking about- you're totally right! I've chased that sound for a while myself, I had some success with using a very resonant bandpass filter and then a bitcrusher (I think at about 2khz). Now that I think about it, that bandpass filter is very formant like... Also I totally get wanting to do it manually, you learn a lot doing things that way. Good luck!
Which synthesizer were you using @ 5:18 ? it sweeps through pitches smoothly. how did you do that?
I believe it was ableton’s wavetable, but lots of synths can do that pitch smoothing, the parameter you’re looking for is called glide or portamento.
This was the first video I found on the subject and didint understand anything, after a bit of research this video became extremley powerful!
Perfect video. Bravo.
Amazing explanation man! Thank you for this
Wow! Excellent explanation and demonstration. Thanks for that!
Great! Which sound did you use in your synthesizer?
Thanks for explaining this. Now I understand vocoders.
Formants are natural 'chords' (frequencies) that the voice makes .
Like piano chords, *formant frequencies* have specific and consistent interval lengths between them that aid the identification of them regardless of where they fall on the spectrogram.
I think you're confusing formants for overtones/harmonics. There is a set of intervals between overtones (the harmonic series) that stays the same no matter where they fall on the spectrogram- like you said. Formants are ranges of frequencies where overtones are amplified, not the overtones themselves.
Just saved my vocal ped exam, thank you! Also useful for producing.
very well taught
incredible video thank you
Excellent! Thank you.
that is the best explanation I've seen
thank you ❤️
great explanation!
Very useful, thanks
Extremely insightful !!
Good explanation
Great video, how you put your voice through the synth ?
I think it was an ableton plugin.
Brilliant explanation and demonstration!
Now I can create choirs out of synthesizers. Thank you!
Fantastic video, thank you!
This is fantastic information, thanks for the lesson!
very good explanation!
Oh my god thank you so much! Finally I understood Formants
This is really well explained, thank you so much.
best vid about formant
Your unfiltered voice is awesome
Wow thank you! I'm honestly insecure about how I talk some times so much appreciated :)
Could you please edit and correct your captions? This will make your video more accessible to folks with hearing difficulties. Thank you!
Thank you for this very helpful explanation. Do you have the possibility to compare the formants of two voices, recorded in very different situations, and establish if the two individuals are related to each other. I have read some academic articles that explain the hereditarity of the voice apparatus and, then, of some aspects of the voice.
It is true that related people have voices that sound similar, and that no doubt has to do with similarly shaped vocal tracts- and therefore formants. However, I doubt that the shape of two peoples' vocal tracts alone could be enough to establish relationship, let alone two peoples' characteristic formants, which can be manipulated by the speaker.
An interesting thought though! Perhaps an AI would be able to identify relationships between people through their voices some day...
@@seanthomasmartin2184 thank you for this answer!
Great video. Two questions: 1) what kind of waveform/preset did you use on the synth? 2) In the second formant pair should the distance be the same absolute or relative (200-600 -> 2000-2400 or 2000-6000)?
1) It's a sawtooth
2) no idea
Amazing!
Great explanation. Thanks
Very well explained. Thank You
Crazy good explanation; thank you!
great video
You got yourself a 100th sub🔥🔥
Awesome explanation!
awesome video but at 5:00 it's not quite accurate. If the pitch is outside the formant range, you can't make the vowel.
What are two applications in the video for synthesising sound? I like your voice！
Very informative and very well explained! 😉
Sean, KUDOS on one of the best explanations of vocal formants on the Internet! I have a song sung by a male quartet on an mp3. Can you tell me how to change the formants and raise the pitch a fourth to make the singers sound like females?
this was such a funny tutorial lmao
soo intresting!! thank you