VowelQuest

The speech synthesis tool VowelQuest is a piece of software for phonetic/phonological research into vowel systems.

VowelQuest allows the user to pinpoint vowels in the acoustic space, by identifying what constitutes aurally the best fit to each of the vowels in their language. The tool provides as output the list of formant frequencies that correspond to these perceptually identified vowels. 

• A tool to become familiar with formant synthesis
  Synthesizing speech from formant values is a good way to approach the Acoustic Theory of Speech Production (Fant 1960), which is the backbone of modern approaches to acoustic phonetics 
• Friendly interface
  The present tool retains the advanced functions of R. Carré’s original script. But the interface was devised so that the tool can be used by students without a prior command of phonetics software. Beginners should find it easy to get started and use this software for perceptual tests.
• Unicode encoding for vowel symbols
  to ensure correct display of International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, as well as of orthographic representations in any of the world’s writing systems.
• Manipulation of three formants
  In many vowel systems, the third formant is an important dimension of the acoustic definition of vowels. For example, the contrast between /i/ and /y/ is typically a matter of F3 target, and rhotic vowels (as in American English bird or Mandarin –er 儿) are characterized by an especially low F3, sometimes below 2,000 Hz.

X-phthong

The speech synthesis tool Xphthong is software for phonetic/phonological research into vowel systems.

This tool allows the user to generate a monophthong (a sound with just one vowel target, like the vowel [ɒ] in English pot [pʰɒt]), diphthong (2 vowel targets, like the [aɪ] in English type [tʰaɪp]), triphthong (3 targets, as in English iron [aɪə]), or any higher number of successive vowel targets, hence the name ‘X-phthong’, where X refers to the number of targets.

• A tool to become familiar with formant synthesis
  Synthesizing speech from formant values is a good way to approach the Acoustic Theory of Speech Production (Fant 1960), which is the backbone of modern approaches to acoustic phonetics 
• Friendly interface
  The present tool retains the advanced functions of R. Carré’s original script, such as the possibility to modify fundamental frequency, and to control the duration of transitions between vowel targets. But the interface was devised so that the tool can be used by students without a prior command of phonetics software. Beginners should find it easy to get started and begin synthesizing sequences of vowel targets.
• Unicode encoding for vowel symbols
  to ensure correct display of International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, as well as of orthographic representations in any of the world’s writing systems.