A guide to English phonetics:

WHAT IS PHONETICS?

Phonetics is the study and classification of speech sounds. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds, including their physiological production, acoustic properties, and auditory perception.

Basically, phonetics studies how sounds are produced, transmitted and received. 

Based on these three primary functions, phonetics can be classified into three subcategories: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics.

Articulatory phonetics studies the production of speech sounds by the articulatory and vocal tract of the speaker.

The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics that studies articulation and ways that humans produce speech. Articulatory phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different psychological structures. Generally, articulatory phonetics is concerned with the transformation of aerodynamic energy into acoustic energy Phonetics.

Aerodynamic energy refers to the airflow through the vocal tract. Its potential form is air pressure; its kinetic form is the actual dynamic airflow. Acoustic energy is variation in the air pressure that can be represented as sound waves, which are then perceived by the human auditory system as sound.

Acoustic phonetics studies the physical transmission of speech sounds from the speaker to the listener. It’s a branch of phonetics that studies the physical parametres of speech sounds.

It is the most “technical” of all disciplines concerned with the study of verbal communication and one of the fundamental questions acoustic phonetics answers is the question of: “What is sound”?

Acoustic phonetics is the study of the acoustic characteristics of speech, including an analysis and description of speech in terms of its physical properties, such as frequency, intensity, and duration. For example approaching a concert, for example, you may well hear the thumping of the bass music before all else. This is because a sound produced at one place, say a loudspeaker, sets up a sound wave that travels through the acoustic medium.

Auditory phonetics studies the reception and perception of speech sounds by the listener. That is Auditory phonetics is the branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech sounds and with speech perception. Example how do you receive sound and understand to pick out intended meaning.

It thus entails the study of the relationships between speech stimuli and a listener’s responses to such stimuli as mediated by mechanisms of the peripheral and central auditory systems, including certain areas of the brain..