Phonetics

"The Rain in Spain" is a song from the musical My Fair Lady, with music by Frederick Loewe and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. The song was published in 1956, sounding similar to piano trio in C minor 3rd movement by Josep Suk.

Ludimar Hermann (October 31, 1838 – June 5, 1914) was a German physiologist and speech scientist who used the Edison phonograph to test theories of vowel production, particularly those of Robert Willis and Charles Wheatstone. He coined the word formant, a term of importance in modern acoustic phonetics. The Hermann Grid is named after him; he was the first to report the illusion in scientific literature.

Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as unvoiced) or voiced.

Haskins Laboratories, Inc. is an independent 501(c) non-profit corporation, founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut, since 1970. Upon moving to New Haven, Haskins entered in to formal affiliation agreements with both Yale University and the University of Connecticut; it remains fully independent, administratively and financially, of both Yale and UConn. Haskins is a multidisciplinary and international community of researchers which conducts basic research on spoken and written language. A guiding perspective of their research is to view speech and language as emerging from biological processes, including those of adaptation, response to stimuli, and conspecific interaction. The Laboratories has a long history of technological and theoretical innovation, from creating systems of rules for speech synthesis and the first working prototype of a reading machine for the blind to developing the landmark concept of phonemic awareness as the critical preparation for learning to read an alphabetic writing system.

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status.

The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, such as talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, etc. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production in which the vocal folds (vocal cords) are the primary sound source. (Other sound production mechanisms produced from the same general area of the body involve the production of unvoiced consonants, clicks, whistling and whispering.)

Léon Roques (born 24 October 1839 in Aurignac, died 1923) was a French transcriber who is best known for his transcriptions of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Perhaps his most familiar transcription is for violin and piano of Debussy's piano work La plus que lente.

In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in: Arabic, Finnish, Fijian, Kannada, Japanese, Latin, Old English, Scottish Gaelic, and Vietnamese. While vowel length alone does not change word meaning in most dialects of English, it is said to do so in a few dialects, such as Australian English, Lunenburg English, New Zealand English, and South African English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike in other varieties of Chinese.

A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. However, because of their relatively recent modernizations compared to English, the Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian and Polish orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.

Diction (Latin: dictionem (nom. dictio), "a saying, expression, word"), in its original meaning, is a writer's or speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story. In its common meaning, it is the distinctiveness of speech, the art of speaking so that each word is clearly heard and understood to its fullest complexity and extremity, and concerns pronunciation and tone, rather than word choice and style. This is more precisely and commonly expressed with the term enunciation, or with its synonym articulation.