Customer Reviews

Acoustic Analysis of Speech

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there may be a hundred books that teach acoustic analysis of speech, however this book will make the reader smile all along as he/she reads. The explanations are clear, and easily digested by the reader. It gives a feeling that kent and read are beside you and explainging things out and thats what a student expects from a book.

I am about half way through reading this book for a course I'm taking. It is pretty good but, if you're like me, you'll definitely need to look up terms that are not explained. The glossary in the book is not super extensive, at 5 1/2 pages. The tone of the writing is also inconsistent: it ranges from chatty to highly technical.

The book itself seems very cheaply made ... the (paperback) cover and pages are so thin that it flops around and bends quite easily, and if you highlight in it, your marks may show through to the other side of the page. Interior is black and white (not that it really needs color).

Chapters are:
1. An Introduction to the Study of Speech Acoustics
2. Acoustic Theory of Speech Production
3. Introduction to the Acoustic Analysis of Speech
4. The Acoustic Characteristics of Vowels and Diphthongs
5. The Acoustic Characteristics of Consonants
6. The Acoustic Correlates of Speaker Characteristics
7. Suprasegmental Properties of Speech
8. Speech Synthesis
Appendix A Phonetic Symbols for Vowels and Consonants
Appendix B Elementary Physics of Sound
Appendix C Nonlinear Frequency Scales for Speech Analysis
References
Glossary
Index

The book is great, especially for my class. The only problem I had was I ordered the book on December 12th and was supposed to receive it by December 20th, but did not get it until January 7th.