formant

plural formants

1. human sciencesA band of frequencies in a sound spectrum that have greater intensity and determine the quality of a sound, especially the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract that determine the quality of vowels and sonorant consonants.

   2 more examples

   The resonances of the vocal tract are called formants. Trying to hear the separate formants in a vowel is difficult. We are so used to a vowel being a single meaningful entity that it is difficult to consider it as a sound with separable bits. But it is possible to say vowels so that some of their component parts are more obvious.

   2012, Peter Ladefoged, Sandra Ferrari Disner, Vowels and Consonants, Kindle edition, New York: Wiley, →ISBN

   In natural speech, of course, formants are always present during vowels, and this suggests a reason for the preference for linguistic tone on vowels rather than, say, on fricatives. Fricatives have no formant structure, and thus detection of linguistically significant pitch on a fricative might be impaired.

   2002, Moira Yip, chapter 10, in Tone (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 290