Customer Reviews

The Acoustics of Speech Communication: Fundamentals, Speech Perception Theory, and Technology

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A great deal of well-organized, well-presented information regarding the nature of speech, including many spectrograms with formant tracks. The review of speech perception theory is also well done. The technology is treated in only the final chapter, and definitely qualifies as an overview. The only glaring omission is no description whatsoever of the human auditory mechanism. Nevertheless, the book suited my purposes well.

This is a fine book for approaching the field of speech communication. It includes lucid presentations of key concepts such as phoneme, phone, allophone, units, formants and the Bernoulli's effect. Every chapter closes with a summary, a great tool for reinforcing what you have learned through the chapters. Chapters 1-10 are introductory material, and following chapters discuss more advanced topics, such as models of perception. Application developers will also benefit from a summary of potential acoustic cues from articulatory features (p. 152). Finally, the appendices constitute great teaching and researching resources.

If you are completely new to he field, I would suggest to read first "The Speech Chain" by Denes & Pinson, then Chapters 1-10 of this book. Later on, you may follow with "Acoustic Phonetics" by Stevens, "Acoustic Theory of Speech Production" by Fant, "Speech Processing" by Deng and O'Shaugnessy, and "Spoken Language Processing" by Huang et al.

Great textbook. Not the easiest in the world but surely the most comprehensive for a Speech Science course. Thoroughly sound. Don't think there is another like it. Using it in our course with excellent response from students.