In a spectrogram we can see, for example, that the sound energy of an e is distributed across entirely different frequencies than those present in an a, and that an m mostly has energy in a lower spectrum of frequencies, while an s, on the other hand, is mostly concentrated in the higher range. The fundamental frequency, that is to say the part that we normally perceive as the pitch or melody of speech, can be measured using acoustic methods. We can measure precisely how high or how low the pitch of an individual speaker is, whether a phrase or a sentence has a monotone melody or has tonal highs and lows, whether the melody rises or falls or maybe does both. Acoustic analysis is objective, which means that the results are always the same regardless of who conducts the measurements (at least as long as they enjoyed a basic education in phonetics).
The way the human ear perceives sound depends on the individual listener. It is subjective. A number of factors influence the way that we hear—age, experience and hearing loss, for example. For that reason, many researchers in my field conduct perception or listening tests. In such experiments, a group of listeners are asked to listen to sounds, words or sentences that are pronounced by speakers who speak either in the same or in different dialects. They then compare word A and word B, for example. Are the words pronounced in the same dialect, with the same intonation, the same melody? How old is the speaker? Are sound 1 and sound 2 the same or different? The results from all participants are then compiled and the averages are used to show how the sound stimuli were perceived by the majority of the listeners.
Phoneticians also concern themselves with categorization within linguistic systems, describing the number and type of vowels, consonants, melodic patterns and other traits that characterize a dialect or a language. In this subfield of phonetics—phonology—the rules that govern the combinations of sounds and syllables in a language are studied. English, for example, allows for combinations of consonants at the beginning of a word, such as in stripe
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