Pynchon's vical profile II Pitch & Huffman Vocalic Presence

[Terrance]

Pynchon has six front vowels of Long Island Talk. 

In addition to low front (ae ligature), there is a higher, or ``tensed''
(ae ligature) (henceforth AE). 


Huffman's Problem is complicated by the orthodontic distortions reported
in the critical literature (Pynchon's Ploy: Filed False Teeth Sets in
the novel V., Pynch In On Tom's Beavers, Pynchon Notes, Jan. 2001).
Given the crowded vowel space, spectral dynamism should be equally, if
not more, important to distinguishing Pynchon's Long Island vowels than
other varieties of English such as the Brooklyn English described by
McMurphy et al. 

What we're lookin at here, are vowels recorded in real words of the form
hVd and bVd, spoken in a frame sentence. F1 and F2 values from LPC
spectral analysis are being an alyzed via formant plots and discriminant
analysis.


Preliminary results for front vowels support our  hypothesis thus far:
improvement in discrimination using dynamic rather than static spectral
measures was largest for (epsilon) and AE, the vowels that are closest
in the vowel space. 

Overall use of the vowel space, including comparisons with other
dialects and studies will also be presented soon. 

Bottom line, 

Pynchon gets a 9.0