Acoustics of American English Speech

Book excerpt: This book presents the most contemporary and comprehensive description of the acoustics of the sounds used in American English. Intended to serve as an introductory text for students and professionals interested in acoustic phonetics, linguistics, physics, electrical engineering, and computer science, the authors bring to the subject the points of view of both linguistics and physics. The book uses numerous examples of acoustic spectrograms to show the continuities and variability of natural speech. The book begins by introducing the basic concepts of phonetics, phonology, and linguistics to readers whose background is in physics or engineering and introducing the physics of sound generation and analysis for speech scientists and linguists. The authors then use the tools developed in the first part to examine the characteristics of individual phonemes as well as the changes introduced when individual sounds are combined in speech. Modern applications of speech acoustics, especially speech synthesis and recognition, are also discussed.