Formant

A formant, as used by James Jeans, is a harmonic of a note that is augmented by a resonance. The speech researcher Gunnar Fant defines formants as "the spectral peaks of the sound spectrum |P(f)|". In acoustics generally, a very similar definition is widely used: the Acoustical Society of America defines a formant as: "a range of frequencies [of a complex sound] in which there is an absolute or relative maximum in the sound spectrum". In speech science and phonetics, however, a formant is also sometimes used to mean an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract. Thus, in phonetics, formant can mean either a resonance or the spectral maximum that the resonance produces. Formants are often measured as amplitude peaks in the frequency spectrum of the sound, using a spectrogram (in the figure) or a spectrum analyzer and, in the case of the voice, this gives an estimate of the vocal tract resonances. In vowels spoken with a high fundamental frequency, as in a female or child voice, however, the frequency of the resonance may lie between the widely spaced harmonics and hence no corresponding peak is visible.