Vocaloid Wiki:Sandbox/Phonology and Phonetics for Vocaloid users

Because Vocaloid is a musical tool which attempts to rebuild the speech and expressive elements of a singing voice from a library of recorded samples, the phonologic and phonetic aspect are important elements behind it. Due this sooner or later, the user can't avoid to bump with them in a given time. For that reason, the users must be aware that may require some basic phonological and phonetic knowledge to utilize the software.

This article is an simplified attempt to help to user to understand the phonological and phonetic terms and definitions that can be encountered.

Introduction: Linguistic
Linguistic is the scientific study of human language. This social science has various categories or branches that focus in differents aspect of the language where can be identified 3 main sub-categories:
 * Language Form
 * Language Meaning
 * Language in Context

The first category includes grammar which studies the language structure. This focuses on the system of rules followed by the speakers (or hearers) of a language, and encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound systems). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. This article will focus on the last two.

Although the Phonetics and Phonology covers similar areas and overlaps in various occasions, they are different. The phonetics actually studies the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech. In other words, it deals with the articulatory and acoustic properties of speech sounds, also known as phones. The phonology instead studies describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning, concerning itself with systems of phonemes, sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning.

Seen both definitions is easy to understand that both branches are closely related and overlaps in a series of fields.

In a attempt to classify the phones, several phonetics alphabets and scripts have been created.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (abbreviated as IPA) is a phonetic alphabet created by the International Phonetic Association in a attempt to standardize the representation of the sounds of spoken language. This alphabet uses symbols based in the Latin alphabet and is, arguably, the most utilized phonetic alphabet.

Another important phonetic alphabet is the the Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet also known as X-SAMPA. This phonetic alphabet is an extension of the SAMPA, another computer-readable phonetic script that uses ASCII characters, is based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and which was created to work around the inability of text encodings to represent IPA symbols before the creation and extended use of the Unicode which, unlike the ASCII, supports the IPA's character. The X-SAMPA stills is utilized for input easily the phonemes using the common characters of a keyboard, and in the case of Vocaloid, the phonemes symbols are based on this transcription.

Consonants

 * Read more in Phonology and Phonetics for Vocaloid users/Consonants

Vowels

 * Read more in Phonology and Phonetics for Vocaloid users/Consonants