When working with /i/ vowel in PRAAT as seen in the attachment, PRAAT gives F1 and F2 values which are very close within around 270/365Hz. This persist despite twiddling on the number of formant for PRAAT to look for. Is there a more objective way to get a single representative F1 value other than eyeballing and subjectively drawing a line running the middle of F1+F2.
Though I may not be answering your question exactly, When I see your attachment it looks nothing like the vowel /i/. There is hardly any energy in the region between 1000Hz to 5000Hz. Praat has just marked them as formants due to only sparse energy regions which are hardly significant, but that is how the program does it, but they look nothing like the formants. In this case looking at the spectrogram, I feel the formants praat has shown is quite correct. You may want to recheck and hear that stimulus of yours, I reckon that it should sound something like /u/ .
Hope this helps.
cheers
The spectrogram is for vowel /i/ as in /hi:m/. I have checked it again, and it was /i/ not /u/. I don't know why the second and third formant area were faint as you pointed out. In fact the image I posted was after I have increased the dynamic range in the spectrograms settings to 90dB. I have repeatedly recorded the same findings at that time because of the FI/F2 issue and they are all about the same.
My spectrogram image today are better. I have attached the same one /hi:m/ and the /i/ vowel reflects what you have mentioned. Maybe, this was the reason. Last night I became suspicious that I was recording from my onboard laptop microphone rather than the microphone I was testing. I disabled the onboard one. My spectrogram images were much better after that. Perhaps the previous reading was picked up by the former, and was too faint for a proper analysis.
Hi Abu, problems in formant tracking may arise when two energy peaks are too close together. One way of avoiding such problems are to check the bandwidths of the extracted formant values and to readjust the formant settings if the bandwidths are very large (in my experience larger than approximately 150Hz). Hope this helps.