ABSTRACT
Speech acoustics is concerned with the physical nature of the sounds that travel through the air from speaker to hearer. A sequence of such sounds (the speech signal) forms both the output of the speaking process and the input to the listening process. Therefore speech acoustics can yield interesting evidence about both the production and the perception of speech. The account given here is selective, in that it concentrates on those aspects of the acoustics of speech that are of most relevance for explaining the process of spoken communication. The acoustic phenomena themselves are described with reference to their articulatory production and to their functions in language.
