Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University

This book deals with four major areas in acoustic phonetics: acoustic properties of major classes of speech sounds, acoustic theory of speech production, auditory representation of speech, and speech perception. The book contains nine chapters arranged in two parts. The first part handles the fundamentals of an acoustic-auditory study, and the second applies these fundamentals to speech analysis. Each chapter includes recommended readings and exercises, the solutions to which are provided at the end of the book. Apart from the customary graphs and figures, the book also makes ample use of shaded boxes to digress from the discussion and highlight interesting issues.

The introductory note lays down the blueprint of the book and touches upon the changes and improvements in the third edition. Basic concepts in acoustics, like frequency, amplitude, different kinds of waves, spectrum, and filters are introduced in Ch. 1. Ch. 2 introduces fundamental frequency and harmonics and discusses quantal theory, vocal-tract filtering, and resonance frequency. Ch. 3 addresses digital signal processing in terms of issues like sampling and quantization apart from a discussion on six different techniques used in digital signal processing, including root mean square (RMS) amplitude, fast fourier transform (FFT), and spectra and spectrogram, among others. Ch. 4 covers the differences between acoustic and auditory representation of speech sound, and discusses the effect of saturation and masking on audition. Describing speech perception as imperfectly categorical, Ch. 5 examines the effect of the auditory system and phonetic knowledge on perception.

Arguing that a stand-alone approach to the acoustic study of speech is incomplete, the author approaches the analysis of speech sounds in Part 2 in terms of acoustic, auditory, and perceptual attributes. Chs. 6–9 deal with the analysis of vowels, fricatives, stops and affricates, and nasals and laterals, respectively. The vocal tract constrictions for each are explained in terms of tube models. Other issues discussed include calculation of the resonances, formant frequencies, vocal tract resonance peaks, and source and vocal tract filtering. In terms of individual attributes, the importance of the first two formants for vowels, the location of acoustic energy in the spectrum for fricatives, apart from turbulence that characterize them, the effect of the coupling/decoupling of front and back cavities on resonant frequencies in stops and affricates, and the damping effect of anti-formants in nasals, laterals, and nasalized sounds are also discussed.

The book is intended to be a non-technical supplementary textbook to general phonetics or speech science texts, and will delight and interest students from non-technical backgrounds, particularly the experiments that the shaded boxes invite them to do. Teachers will also find these experiments useful in their classrooms to generate a better appreciation of the technicalities involved. However, at certain points the book might be intimidating to non-specialists, with the many formulas and calculations presented. The correlation drawn between the acoustic, auditory, and perceptual aspects of speech sounds makes this book a unique contribution to texts on speech sounds.