Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics. This discipline focuses on the study of the sounds used in speech.

There are three major braches of phonetics.

Auditory phonetics - It looks at how people perceive the sounds they hear.
Acoustic phonetics – It looks at the waves involved in speech sounds and how they are interpreted by the human ears.
Articulatory phonetics – It looks at how sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus.

Phonetics is studied and used not only by the people interested in linguistics but also by speech therapists, computer speech synthesizers, and people who are simply interested in learning how they make the sounds they do.