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Preface

Courses in acoustic phonetics at universities are primarily aimed at humanities students, who are often skeptical about the need to assimilate the principles of physics that underlie the methods of analysis in phonetics. To avoid frightening anyone, many textbooks on phonetics are careful not to go into too much detail about the limitations and inner workings of the electronic circuits or algorithms used.

In writing this book, I have tried to maintain a different point of view. I am convinced that the basic principles of acoustic speech analysis can be easily explained without necessarily having to acquire a mathematical background, which would only be of interest to engineers studying telecommunications. To me, it seems more important to understand the analysis processes without necessarily knowing how to formalize them, in order to be able to fully master their properties and limitations and to face the practical problems of their use.

In fact, in terms of a mathematical background, it is usually enough to remember the notions learned in high school regarding elementary trigonometric functions, sine, cosine, tangent and cotangent, as well as logarithms (a reminder of their definitions can be found in the appendix). I hope that, with a reasonable effort in comprehension, readers will avoid errors and misinterpretations in the implementation and interpretation of acoustic measures, errors that are too often (and too late) found today in thesis defenses involving phonetic measures.

Illustrations involving the trigonometric functions were made using Graph software. Those presenting acoustic analysis results were obtained using WinPitch software. These various types of software can be downloaded for free from the Internet¹.

All that remains, is for me to thank the students of experimental phonetics in Aix-en-Provence, Toronto and Paris, as well as the excellent colleagues of these universities, for having allowed me, through their support, their criticisms and their suggestions, to progressively implement and improve the courses in acoustic phonetics that form the basis of this book. However, I am not forgetting G.B. (whose voice served as a basis for many examples), nor the merry band of doctoral students from Paris Diderot.

Philippe MARTIN

October 2020

1 1 www.padowan.dk and www.winpitch.com.