Compare two recordings

Question

I record myself saying the word "titillate", followed by a very nice recording of the same word which I found from the internet and which I hope my voice can be trained to be as closer to as possible. The recording is here. Following is the waveform (on the top) and spectrogram (on the bottom) of the recording shown by Audacity (for a larger version, click here):

My recording is the first half, and someone else's is the second half. Some impressions I have are

• In our waveforms, mine looks sparser than the other's.
• in our spectrograms, the white areas are distributed differently.

What do those indicate? What are your impressions?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You are mostly seeing the difference in quality between a professional mic and audio interface rather than a laptop mic and built in consumer sound card. The lower frequencies are picked up well on both, but the higher frequencies are much less sensitive and much more sparse. If you look at the actual pattern of it, the pattern is relatively simple.

Clearly they lead with more force on their first word than you did and had clearer breaks between, but a lot of that may be noise interfering as well.

All in all, the goal you are trying to accomplish will only give you so much in the way of meaningful information anyway. The waveform will tell you if you are putting the emphasis on the proper syllables and if your timing of the syllables is the same. The spectrogram will tell you if the tone (lower frequencies) and sibilance (higher frequencies that we get the actual syllables from) are generally the right frequency, but they aren't going to give you much meaningful beyond that.

Answer 2

Im still not sure of your exact question, but I couldn't tell much from the audio recording you posted, and you only posted the waveform for 1 of the titillates. If you can post the original titillate you found online, that would be more helpful. If you're directly looking at waveforms, you're likely looking at a recording that has been processed with EQs, compressors, possibly Reverb, and maybe even more. So you will likely have to process your voice to get it looking and sounding like what you heard online.

If you're worried more about your vocal performance, that's a different story, and probably more suited for Musical Practice & Performance stackexchange. Vocalists, particularly opera singers, can give you pronunciation tips and tricks.

If you can clarify your question even further, you'd be able to get a better answer.