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Phonetics

For students with little or no background in phonetics, here we cover just the essentials needed for this course.
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We’ll start with the mechanisms of speech production. Producing speech involves generating a source of sound, combined with a means of modifying (filtering) that sound. Understanding human speech production will directly help us understand what see see in acoustic speech signals, when we inspect waveforms and spectrograms.

However, although the acoustic signal is generally continuously varying, we perceive it as a sequence of discrete categories. So, we need a system of notation for describing those categories: this is phonetics and phonology.

Download the slides for this foundation material on phonetics – not recommended for printing, because there are a very large number (we’ll only use a few in class)

The only source of periodic sound is the vocal folds.
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There are a few other ways of generating sound in the vocal tract.
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An individual language uses only a few of the possible categories of vowels & consonants.
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Vowels are controlled by the position of the tongue, and whether the lips are rounded.
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Consonants can be characterised by place and manner of production, and voicing.
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Reading

Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 7 – The production of speech

Some phonetics at last, and a first encounter with the source-filter model of speech.

link Seeing speech.