Acoustic analysis of Arabic phonemes based-/a:/ vowel

In this paper, an investigation of Arabic phonemes articulation based the vowel /a:/ is addressed. All the Arabic phonemes are uttered by Malay speakers. This paper aims to discover the pronounciation of Arabic phonemes based /a:/ vowel by Malay subjects. 8 Malay speakers have articulated 224 tokens of Consonant-Vowel syllables. Audacity 2.0.3 software is utilised in order to record all the tokens by using SAMSON C03U USB multi-pattern condenser microphone. The speech analysis software PRAAT is used for extracting formant frequencies. Initially, the tokens are manipulated with Spectral subtraction to denoise the tokens. Subsequently, F1, F2, F3, F4 and F5 are measured for each phoneme. The first two formant frequencies (F1 and F2) are employed to represent the phonemes in the vowels-space. The vowel-space has shown that the phonemes are located in central-mid position. As the subjects are not trained to utter the Arabic phonemes with vowels, the vowel-space shows that the speakers are tended to articulate the vowels as a /a/ vowel in some phonemes and in some other phonemes as a /a:/ vowel.