ABSTRACT
Branch of general phonetics that investigates the physical properties of the acoustic structure of speech sounds according to frequency (pitch), quantity (duration), and intensity (spectrum). After 1930, acoustic phonetics advanced (a) through the use of electric, then later electronic, machines of great precision that could produce, intensify, transfer, store, and reproduce speech sounds and (b) through the expanded utility of speech synthesis (speech recognition) especially in computational linguistics. Signal phonetics is a branch of acoustic phonetics that predominantly investigates the phonetic signal. Many recent phonological investigations make extensive use of the concepts and terminology of acoustic phonetics.
