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  • Speech acoustics and phonetics: Selected writings by Gunnar Fant
  • Peter Ladefoged
Speech acoustics and phonetics: Selected writings. By Gunnar Fant. (Text, speech and language technology 24.) Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2006. Pp. xiv, 322. ISBN 1402027893. $64.95.

Gunnar Fant was the first of the great engineers to lay out the field of acoustic phonetics, and this new collection of his papers further documents his achievements. There is no doubt that he is a towering figure in the field. His Acoustic theory of speech production (Fant 1960) provided the solid foundation on which much later work was based.

The nineteen papers that he has selected for this book cover a wide range of topics and make available several papers that are not easy to find. Nine of them appeared previously only in the quarterly reports of the Department of Speech, Music, and Hearing or other in-house publications of the Stockholm Royal Institute of Technology. Two of them have not been in print before, and several of the others are in conference proceedings, handbooks, or encyclopedias rather than readily available journals.

The papers are grouped into six sections, each with a short introduction. The first section consists of a single paper, not previously in print, in which F gives an overview of his more than fifty years of speech research. F was born in October 1919 and began publishing papers on the sounds of Swedish in 1948. Since then he has been a very productive scholar; there are 247 publications listed at the end of this book.

The second section, ‘Speech production and synthesis’, consists of five papers, starting with his early work at Ericsson Telephone Company, in which he lays out the mathematical foundations for the relations between formant frequencies, amplitudes, phase, and bandwidth. Other papers in this section include F’s account of the relation between area functions and the acoustic signal (one of the few publications in a refereed journal, Phonetica) and two papers on speech synthesis, one based on an articulatory model of the vocal tract, and the other, which is of considerable historic interest, describing the OVE II parametric formant synthesis. There is also a paper, published in 2001, updating his analyses of Swedish vowels, relating a three-parameter model of the vocal tract to the corresponding formant data. There is no doubt that this paper provides an interesting account of one way of parameterizing the vocal-tract shapes of a single speaker. But for a paper revised in 2001 it slips up by not updating references to other work on the same topic. It claims, for example, that there is ‘rather meagre data available on vowel specific VT area functions, which has long been dominated by the Russian vowels, (Fant 1960)’ (58). But by 2001 Baer et al. 1991 and other imaging studies were available.

The third section has three papers on the voice source, all coauthored with Qigang Lin and the first also coauthored with Johan Liljencrants. These three papers describe a way of parameterizing the shape of the wave produced at the glottis, the source in F’s source-filter approach to the acoustics of speech. This parameterization, which is known as the L-F (Liljencrants-Fant) model, has become widely used in the literature on phonation types and voice quality.

The fourth section, ‘Speech analysis and features’, starts with a paper published over forty years ago on ‘Descriptive analysis of the acoustic analysis of speech’. F presents a list of phonetic characteristics and their acoustic correlates. Emphasis is given to the fact that every segment is influenced by its neighbors. This is still a good, concise account of the information that can be obtained from spectrograms.

The next paper in this section, which was published in 1997 in an encyclopedia of acoustics, concentrates on analysis and processing techniques. It provides more technical detail than many linguists will want, but is full of valuable information on methods of spectral analysis and extraction of formant frequencies.

The third paper, ‘Features: Fiction and facts’, originally appeared in the proceedings of a symposium in 1986. It provides F’s later views on distinctive features. In the original publication [End Page 189...

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