Speech acoustics: How much science?

Abstract

Human vocalizations are sounds made exclusively by a human vocal tract. Among other vocalizations, for example, laughs or screams, speech is the most important. Speech is the primary medium of that supremely human symbolic communication system called language. One of the functions of a voice, perhaps the main one, is to realize language, by conveying some of the speaker's thoughts in linguistic form. Speech is language made audible. Moreover, when phoneticians compare and describe voices, they usually do so with respect to linguistic units, especially speech sounds, like vowels or consonants. It is therefore necessary to understand the structure as well as nature of speech sounds and how they are described. In order to understand and evaluate the speech, it is important to have at least a basic understanding of science of speech acoustics: how the acoustics of speech are produced, how they are described, and how differences, both between speakers and within speakers, arise in an acoustic output. One of the aims of this article is try to facilitate this understanding.