In speech and sound, a concentration of acoustic energy around a particular frequency that helps give vowels their distinctive sound.
From Latin 'formans' (forming, present participle of 'formare'). Introduced as a linguistics and acoustics term in the early 1900s to describe the spectral peaks in vowel sounds.
Your voice is like a musical instrument, and formants are the specific resonances that make an 'ah' sound different from an 'ee' sound—they're literally the fingerprint of each vowel!
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