Acoustic Phonetics

D. B. Fry has edited a basic course of readings on the acoustics of speech. The collection includes all the important classical papers in the field. It is carefully structured to present the student with a coherent picture of the relations between language units and the corresponding sound-waves and to explain the laws that govern these relations. He includes extracts which explain the generation of sound-waves by the speech-mechanism, the methods of acoustic analysis of speech, and the operation of the sound spectograph (with excerpts from the first published accounts of the instrument). The volume also illustrates the contribution to the general study of language made by research on speech perception. There are accounts of speech synthesis, and of experiments on rhythm, intonation and the perception of acoustic cues.