Parametric Phonetics
Walter Lawrence · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1965
“Phonetics” has been defined as the study of the medium of spoken language in all its forms and varieties. The word parameter is here used to designate any attribute of a spoken sound (as, for instance. pitch, formant frequency, or intensity) that can be expressed as an analog quantity. The subject of parametric phonetics embraces all phonetic studies in which speech utterances are expressed as variations of a finite number of specific parameters. Parameters may be defined at the articulatory level in terms of spatial and temporal measurements of the organs of speech, at the acoustic level in terms of computations and instrumental procedures applied to a speech wave form, and at the auditory level in terms of the signals that must be used to control a speech synthesizer to produce a sensation equivalent to an utterance. The paper reviews the instrumentation available for measuring parameters in speech and discusses the possibility of establishing a complete system of parameters valid at all levels, thereby enabling observations at each level to be used to augment information obtained at other levels.