A Field Manual for Acoustic Phonetics

Book excerpt: This book provides a practical and easy-to-understand introduction to acoustic speech analysis, primarily aimed at those involved in linguistic analysis and description in the field and at those preparing for such fieldwork. It explains commonly used methods for displaying aspects of a speech wave, such as waveform graphs, spectra, spectrograms, fundamental frequency graphs (pitch graphs), and intensity graphs. It illustrates how the results of acoustic analysis can be interpreted and used to improve the objectivity, accuracy and precision of phonetic descriptions of speech sounds. The book assumes basic knowledge of articulatory phonetics. It can be used to teach introductory courses in acoustic phonetics at the undergraduate level.