I'm curious to know if anyone else likes to play 'games' with phonology every now and then.
One thing I like to do is to take a sentence, replace every vowel with the same vowel, and see how comprehensible it is, as well as the aesthetic result. For example, you could replace every vowel with [i], which creates a really pinched sound but doesn't really make it difficult to understand the sentence. You could replace every vowel with an r-colored schwa, which makes it sound like you're a meme from 2008 ("ermergerd").
Though using the same vowel over and over again seems like it should be easy, I find myself subtly altering the vowels based on what I know the original vowel was. For example, in 'based on', I find myself saying [bist ɪn] to mimic the fact that [a] is more open than [eɪ]. Incorporating r-coloring is also more challenging for some vowels than others, as trying to do this challenge with [æ] shows.
There is no point to this game other than to produce silly sounds and see how comprehensible the sentences you produce are. I'm impressed by how comprehensible English is when you basically destroy all vowel information. Spanish is still quite comprehensible, but it loses more and I have to focus to really make out what's being said. I'm almost certain there's some computational phonology concept out there that discusses how much information is encoded in vowels. I know for individual vowels, there's a concept called the functional load, but that's about how much that vowel serves to distinguish from other vowels.
Having tried this experiment has convinced me that writing systems that only use consonants, such as Arabic and Hebrew, are not as restricted as they appear.
If you happen to have linguist friends or just fancy a challenge yourself, you could also try more particular phonology games. For example, you could challenge yourself to shift every vowel in a sentence clockwise based on a vowel diagram to create a new vowel shift. You could also pick a vowel and move it in a direction and then try to imagine what the resulting vowel shift would be like.
