*** Welcome to piglix ***

Breathy voice

Murmur
◌̤
◌ʱ
Encoding
Entity (decimal) ̤
Unicode (hex) U+0324

Murmur (also called breathy voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted so that a larger volume of air escapes, producing a sighing sound. A simple murmured phonation, [ɦ] (not actually a fricative, as a literal reading of the IPA chart would suggest), can sometimes be heard as an allophone of English /h/ between vowels, e.g. in the word behind, for some speakers.

In the context of the Indo-Aryan languages like Sanskrit and Hindi and comparative Indo-European studies, murmured consonants are often called voiced aspirated, as in the Hindi and Sanskrit stops normally denoted bh, dh, ḍh, jh, and gh and the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European phoneme gʷʰ. From an articulatory perspective, the terminology is incorrect, as murmur is a different type of phonation from aspiration. However, murmured and aspirated stops are acoustically similar in that in both cases there is a delay in the onset of full voicing. In the history of several languages (like Greek and some varieties of Chinese), murmured stops have developed into aspirated stops.

There is some confusion as to the nature of murmured phonation. The IPA and authors such as Ladefoged equate phonemically contrastive murmur with breathy voice in which the vocal folds are held with lower tension (and further apart) than in modal voice, with a concomitant increase in airflow and slower vibration of the glottis. In that model, murmur is a point in a continuum of glottal aperture between modal voice and breath phonation (voicelessness). Others, such as Laver, Catford, Trask and the authors of the VoQS, equate murmur with whispery voice, in which the vocal folds (or at least the anterior part of the vocal folds) vibrate as in modal voice, but the arytenoid cartileges are held apart to allow a large turbulent airflow between them. In that model, murmur is a compound phonation of approximately modal voice plus whisper.


...
Wikipedia

...