Acoustic phonetics

Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or other properties of its spectrum, and the relationship of these properties to abstract linguistic concepts like phones, phrases, or utterances.

The systematic and widespread study of acoustic phonetics began soon after the invention of the spectrograph at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the mid 1940s. The spectrograph enabled or greatly facilitated the systematic study of the spectral properties of periodic and aperiodic speech sounds, vocal tract resonances and vowel formants, voice quality, prosody, etc.

See also

• List of phonetics topics

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