What Are Formants on a Spectrogram?

A formant is a dark band on a wide band spectrogram, which corresponds to a vocal tract resonance. Technically, it represents a set of adjacent harmonics which are boosted by a resonance in some part of the vocal tract.

What are formants used for?

Formants are distinctive frequency components of the acoustic signal produced by speech, musical instruments or singing. The information that humans require to distinguish between speech sounds can be represented purely quantitatively by specifying peaks in the amplitude or frequency spectrum.

What are the formants in speech?

Formants are frequency peaks in the spectrum which have a high degree of energy. They are especially prominent in vowels. Each formant corresponds to a resonance in the vocal tract (roughly speaking, the spectrum has a formant every 1000 Hz). Formants can be considered as filters.