Making sounds: The Pink Trombone (1 hour)

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Pink Trombone is a fun and weird website. It's a digital vocal tract, where you can make different sounds by closing different parts of the mouth. I won't tell you exactly how to use it; you should explore it so you can figure out how to make different places of articulation, different manners of articulation, voiced vs. voiceless sounds, etc.

I want you to figure out how to use Pink Trombone to make the following sounds:

• The English word bee
• The Cantonese pronunciation of 雅 (if you don't know how this is pronounced in Cantonese, you can look it up or ask a friend)
• Just "f" (e.g., the first consonant in fart)

Note: to make these sounds, you may also need to change the vowel that is being produced, and we didn't talk about phonetic features of vowels in the previous activity. You can check the reading from the beginning of that activity: I only assigned you to read the pages that are about consonants, but there are a few pages later about vowels. Or, you can just experiment with the website and figure out on your own how to make different vowel sounds.

My answers are shown in the videos below.

When you have finished these activities, continue to the next section of the module: "Phonetic description of tone".

by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-04-18. CC-BY-4.0.