In the previous section, we described speech sounds mainly by stating how they are made, but it is also possible to describe them in terms of what we can hear. The way in which we hear a sound depends on its acoustic structure. Acoustic measurements are useful for analyzing various features of pronunciation or describing specific sounds in terms of articulatory movements. For example, the waveform and the intensity provide a good way of understanding variations in speech length. In this section, we will discuss each of these aspects of speech sounds and consider techniques for analyzing them.
