The Sounds of American Speech

Personal computers have been able to store sounds for more than two decades now, since the launch of Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) in 1988 and subsequent development of common audio formats like Sound Designer II (SDII) and the Waveform Audio Format (WAV).Audio file technology lies behind MP3s and podcasts, of course, but linguists benefited from it almost as soon as it emerged, because it allows not only storage of speech data but also the manipulation and analysis of that data as applications were invented to do so.By now, American Speech has published plenty of research based on data stored and analyzed in audio files, but the sounds themselves cannot be heard in printed text, so authors and readers have relied on conventional graphic representations of sound in such work: IPA transcriptions, spectrographic images, marked-up vowel space charts, and so much else that we have devised to overcome the necessary silence of print media

Audiology · Linguistics · History · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology