Why Y Is a Vowel According to Physics (and so is W) 

So did this video make you say "oooh" or was it more of an "aaah" experience? let me know down here in the comments, friends.

As a person with hearing loss who struggles to tell the difference between v and b, I had to keep reminding myself that Joe was talking about vowels.

So a vowel saves another vowel’s life. The other vowel says, “Aye E! I owe you!”

Got to the Pink Trombone. When I am learning Korean, it is so interesting that they consider Y and Ws are treated as Vowels as they are formed from combining the 5 vowels and it is reflected on the way they write. /wa/ is a combination of /o/ ㅗ and /a/ ㅏ= 와 /wu/ or /oo/ is formed from /u/ ㅜ and /o/ ㅓ = 워 /ya/ is formed from /i/ and /a/ in this case they add a single line to ㅏ turning it to ㅑ.

Hi! I'm an opera singer and vocal coach, and I teach with a particular focus on the science and anatomy of the voice. I absolutely LOVE this summary of how vowels are formed (and therefore how resonance works), and will be saving it to show to future new students! ✨ (Also: pink trombone!)

**reads the title** Me: "What a dumb question." My brain a second later: "No, No. He's Got a Point." **Clicks video**

I used pink trombone in my phonetics class for my linguistics degree. We also had to look at graphs and identify which vowel was plotted there based just on the formants.

When my students get confused about when Y is a vowel, I tell them, "The secret is that it is always a vowel, even when it's a consonant." Just one of the peculiarities of this weird pink trombone of ours.

One of the most clear discussions about vowel formants I've come across--thanks. I'm a singing voice teacher and every one of my students gets a combination of awe and brain melt when this subject comes up! Also, the tube-vowel experiments are great fun; also, also, I'm so pleased you mentioned Pink Trombone , it's such a lot of fun.

As a voice teacher, I am constantly trying to explain a lot of this to my students. Thank you for giving me a new voice for them to listen to! And, btw, pink trombone!

Nothing like a phonetics lesson to get people to make sounds while they're learning.

As someone who did my undergrad in speech sciences and master’s in audiology, I loved this video so much. Great scope and coverage, Joe!

The pink trombone experiment is interesting! Thank you for including it in your video!

Hey pink trombone! Dr. Geoff Lindsay recently made some videos that talk about the issues with the IPA vowel space chart that you you must've noticed when trying to illustrate things like gliding from one place to another, using an alternative that makes better use of the two chambers approach you naturally moved to, which is more akin to color space charts

Fun fact! The masculinity / femininity of a voice is also based on formants as well: specifically, the difference between the fundamental and the first formant. This is because during male puberty, the primary vocal tract gets bigger causing the first formant to drop. I kinda find this wild since it means that the gender of a voice is not dependent on pitch, despite what you'd think at first, and explains how you can have women with butch voices or men who are higher pitched and still sound like their gender. (or heck, how the Chipmunks still sound like boys even tho they have incredibly high pitched voices) And another fun consequence is that ppl with masculine voices can sound feminine if you learn how to use your throat muscles to shorten your vocal tract while holding your pitch steady, as this will raise the first formant again and basically undo what puberty did.

Wonderful! The best eye-opening course I ever took was on speech production and perception. You covered a small part of the magic that happens when we speak and understand each other.

I was just studying this for making my new constructed language and script but was having a hard time understanding it on my own. I was so happily surprised to see that you just made a video on this exact topic a few weeks ago. Thanks for making this video. Really great explanation. Helped me a lot at the right time.

The pink trombone thing looks so cool!

Great video! I remember when I learned the source-filter model of phonetics in undergrad and it blew my mind - being able to identify the formants of a spectrogram of a speech signal, and learning how to determine what sounds they were purely by matching frequencies to the shape of the vocal tract was wild! And then in grad school I worked in the speech and signal processing department, so I spent a lot of time dealing with acoustic data. It's one of my favorite aspects of linguistics for sure. Pink Trombone isn't a site I'd heard of before though, so that's really cool too!

Man, you have several great videos. This one was simple and amazing. My favourite so far. Thanks for blowing our minds!

Oh God I seriously never expected pink trombone to be that much addictive... I've created sounds that should be considered warcrimes according to the geneva convention.

Small detail at 3:58 : When you pronounce a [u], you also round your lips. The sound you pronounce at first is more like [ɯ], the unrounded version of [u]. When you see pairs at the same location on the chart, the difference is basically just rounding, i.e. if your lips are rounded or not. By convention, unrounded on the left, and rounded on the right. For example, [y] is the rounded version of [i], and is how the French "u" and the German "ü" are pronounced. [j] (written "y" in English) and [w] are called semi-vowels. They are approximant consonants that sound very similar to closed vowels, to the point some languages don't quite differentiate between the two. Note that "y" in English can be used either for the consonant [j], like in "yes" [jɛs], or for a vowel, generally [i] or [ai~aɪ] (the latter is what we call a diphthong, which is a vowel that changes its articulation as it's pronounced). For example, in "really", it's [i] (or sometimes [e] if you're British), and in "why", it's the diphthong. There is some debate in linguistics about how the vowel chart is organized and how the phonetic alphabet functions, as when the phonetic alphabet was created back in the 19th century, we didn't have a full understanding of how vowels work. Dr. Geoff Lindsey has a video called "The Vowel Space" which goes into that topic and dives deeper into the topic of formants, if anyone is interested. He uses color combinations as an analogy to how formants combine, which is very interesting. Additional note : Voiceless vowels actually exist. This is what you do when you're whispering. In some languages, they are actually used in normal speech as well.

pink trombone 😂 this was very cool! and then on top of that you have to add pitch which is another frequency... variations in pitch can communicate so much also and some people are able to pick up on much finer variations than others. so much complexity.

It has been just first 5 minutes of the video and I've already learned and enjoyed more than with any other internet content in my whole life! Thanks Joe!

I’m a graduate student in linguistics, and the concepts you’re describing here is one of the craziest parts of my field. How is it that these sounds we make not only communicate to someone, but can somehow unpack an entire concept from your mind into another’s.

I’m Danish and I loved how you mentioned danish because as a Dane I don’t see the weird or difficult in us having 40 vowels😂✨

Please never stop making videos they're top notch and an absolute blast to watch, thanks profoundly!

Who could possibly NOT watch it to the end. I kind of knew how the vocal cords worked, but your details were super informative as well as exquisitely surprising. I also love your sense of humor. When "Its OK To Be Smart" disappeared from RU-vid I actually cried. It took me a few years to find out where you had snuck off too. Yeah, I'm a little slow at times. In any case, please keep the videos coming; they make my day.

Pink trombone. Slightly creepy but fun too.

Apparently there is a strong argument that R is also a vowel in some dialects of English. The PBS RU-vid show Otherwords made an episode about that recently and it was super interesting.

Pink trombone! Great video, I love this topic. I was hoping you'd slip in a mention of tonal languages too though!

Pink Trombone! I always think about how we create sound which then makes our language. Thank you for the video!

Everyone wonders why ooh doesn't sound like aah 🗿

Thank you Joe. I really love your channel, and as a phonetics teacher I appreciate even more that this video focus on vowels. The "surprising places" part really made my day. Gracias! (Pink Trombone)

Pink trombone! I love learning about dialects and accents. The explanation of tongue placement with the lopsided trapazoid diagram didn't click until the Pink Trombone demo. Thanks (and thanks?) for that visual aid and weird tool/toy. 😅

As someone who loves to augment my voice to emulate different accents, pitches, and tones, this video is vastly interesting! I love it!

As a mom of a daughter with a speech delay it wasn't until I started thinking about language and sounds that I realized how complicated language can be. It takes a lot of small movements in our mouths and with our vocal cords to make words and our little ones need to learn all of this mostly from listening to people speak and watching our mouth movements.

that pink trombone looks interesting. i've been wondering sometimes how some other sounds are made

I love it when linguistics and science come together. Great video!

Pink trombone! This episode opens up new ways to look at language from scientific perspective. Thank you Joe and team

Pink trombone! This was amazing for me since I've wondered for a long time how speech works. Denmark isn't the worlds largest country, so when it's mentioned I feel proud, even when it's insignificant as 40 vowels since other languages probably have more.

Trombone that is pink

Pink trombone 😁 thanks joe i look forward to your channel on RU-vid every week 😊

My voice professor probably would have really dug this. She had a doctorate in vocal science. She and her peers trailblazed this discipline that sought to understand the biology behind singing. They got into resonance chambers in the human body, stance, and muscle engagement (tighten that buttocks). the whole class ended up at more than 3 octaves without engaging falsetto. The class improved my vital capacity (which helped my asthma) and the vibrations helped clear my sinuses. She was amazing.

Reminds me of my linguistics classes back in 97 to 01. Pink trumpet wasn’t out yet. I’m sure it’s very helpful

Pink Trombone

At a sound exhibit, I saw an oscilloscope that measured the waves of what you spoke. The base line, instead of being a straight line, was circular. Different sounds made waves of different overtones, some showing Lots of variation from the basic circle, and some with only three or a small number of wave cycles around the circle. I sang an "O" in my regular voice and saw a lot of overtone waves. Then I tried to bring my voice shape to be only pure tonic. I noticed that the closer I could bring my voice closer to tonic-I measured this by watching the ring becoming closer and closer to a smooth ring-the more my voice sounded mechanical! Like a generated voice or robot voice with no modulation. That was spooky!

Hello there Joe! Love the videos you do. Since I recently saw one on how you had recognised that a previous video had drawn erroneous conclusions owing to a lack of information, I hope you won't take this criticism amiss... I have been a Teacher of English as a foreign language for 30 years and love teaching phonetics and I can assure you that, in BRITISH English, there are 20 pure vowel sounds. This may , of course be totally different in American English! I couldn't recognise as human some of the sounds you made in the video 😂 Love your channel! I often share it with my students. But not in this case!🤣

Thank you Joe....❤ I always wondered how 'talking' is done. I have searched the internet for this knowledge but never found it. Thank you Joe. Pink trombone ✌🏻

I love to play with my pink trombone every day.

Pink Trombone!!! Your videos are amazing!!

Oh, so the harmonics are why, when I converted an Audacity recording to MuseScore to make sheet music, it made a complete mess that vaguely resembled the notes I sang but mostly sounded like a keyboard smash.

Fascinating as always! About to go lose a few hours to a pink trombone rabbit hole now…

I remember being in the fourth grade and first learning about how frequency and amplitude affect our perception of sound waves. I immediately raised my hand and asked the question in the title of this video. Oh... the look of existential panic on my teacher's face. I'm glad to finally have an answer.

Joe! I love your videos, you're amazing! (something something, pink trombone)

Pink Trombone sir, thank you for another special episode! Very cool!

Nice of you to mention trombones because I got a pink trombone myself!

I started making all the sounds and my roommates think I have gone mad. FUN!!

I'm glad you made a video about phonetics, I am fascinated by language and other things our pink trombones can produce.

Pink trombone.. will check it out, my son is into linguistics so he was fascinated with this

Pink trombone best trombone

I’m currently teaching two kiddos phonics. Pink trombone will be awesome to show them about the vowel sounds they are learning!!

As a trumpet player I’ve found how critical it is to make the right vowel sound while playing, wonder how a pink trombone would sound though. I do a lot impressions too, never occurred how much I changed my vocal tract

Oh wow! I always wondered what vocal cords look like. This is a really fun channel.

One of the coolest videos a pink trombone could put out.

Pink Trombone. I am going to check that out. Should be interesting, just like this show always is!

Joe: W is a vowel Every Deutsch in a 1000 km radius: Vat?

A follow-up to this could be a video about throat singing/overtone singing. When I change notes while overtone singing, I am just changing the vowel I am singing. But because I am isolating and amplifying the high overtones, you hear different notes instead of different vowel sounds. Dr. Richard Feynman would be proud of you, posthumously, if you talked about throat singing, too.

Hearing this video just before my choir practice. Gotta go train my pink trombone :D Seriously though, thanks for the video, it was very nicely done! :)

Is a Pink Trombone just pink in color or does it have any specialties?

Very informative! I've tried being a singer from time to time and have trouble due to allergies so gave up, but this was fascinating. I had no idea that some of the way I form vowels is ... non-standard, which might be why I have more trouble with allergies getting in the way. Maybe I'll have better success if I practice making my less resonant vowels in a more "standard" way. Thanks! Also, haha pink trombone (have opened the link to check out later)

The fact that our bodies do extremely complex stuff without we thinking about it deeply fascinates me. I usually like to take walking as an example. We are precisely controlling many muscles in our feet, toes, knee, ankle, arms, head, back etc. It's insane how we were able coordinate all these muscles and master such a feat. This makes me believe that, we are practically unstoppable and can do anything we want to, we just have to practice and commit! Also, Pink trombone.

PINK TROMBONE, BABY!!!

Pink trombone pick a trombone

Pink Trombone! Very cool video. Thank you Joe!

1:55 Very surprised the OED doesn't also include "tsk," but I checked my copy and you're right!

pink trombone is an awesome band name!

Pink trombone looks cool

pink trambone and a mom teaching daughter to use her voice as an instrament. Man this kid loves to sing...👍🎤❤👩‍💻👩‍🦳 thanks Joe🎉

The reason why w and y are classified as “semivowels” is because their phonological function is different from that of vowels, but phonetically they can be thought of as vowels (for all non-academic intents and purposes). In particular, semivowels are non-syllabic, meaning that they cannot appear as single syllables, whereas vowels can, like the first syllable [ə] of “America”.

Pink trombone?...

Coltrane's pink trombone!?

Pink Trombone, great episode Joe! Can you explain a Guitar Talkbox though? People are totally confused by how they work, cheers

Cool program! The online OED has entries for the words "tsk" and "tsk-tsk," which also have no vowels.

Asking the real questions mankind desperately needs answers for, respect

Pink trombone Like deployed 👍

I remember when I first learned about vowel formants, I was blown away that a vowel only really needs a couple of frequencies to be distinguishable. It’s weird to me that a couple of pitches put together like that suddenly sound like a phoneme, and I don’t even really hear them as separate tones anymore.

Importantly, vowels aren't the only sounds that get vocalized. A D is basically just a vocalized T, for example. If you're going to argue that W is a vowel, then you should consider R a candidate as well. I *think* the linguistic distinction of a vowel is about more than just vocalization and mouth shape. It also has to do with how those sounds can be strung together to make words. Vowel sounds all can exist distinctly between consonant sounds, but W and R don't usually meet this criteria. Phonetics are complex.

Pink trombone! 😆 🤣 😂 😹 😆 lol

Claim your Pink Trombone gang certificate here

I was expecting that Joe would produce words or something with these tubes that correspond for different vowels. I was waiting until the end. That's why, pink trombone.

In Czech we often use r and l as wovels (we call them syllable forming consonants). Foreigners often complain that we have to many consonants.

Pink trombone 👍

11:45 you sound just like Owen Wilson. Another excellent video thank you !

(Pink trombone). This was really cool. And, as much as your vocal tract impression of a wah pedal was good, I think you DO need a guitar, which I’m quite happy to see, as a fellow guitarist.

Pink Trombone fr

In Swedish we gave 9 vowels, and yes, Y is one of them. When learning English I found it weird that Y was taught as a consonant

Pink trombone. That was awesome. Worth a like 👍

Pink trombone! Thankz! It’s great for demonstrating pronunciation when teaching IPA and phonics!! 💕

Pink trombone !