Vocaloid Wiki:Sandbox/Phonology and Phonetics for Vocaloid users

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The following is a tutorial made for VOCALOID fans by fellow VOCALOID fans.

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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.

About Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. This cognitive science has various categories or branches that focus on different aspects of the language. Among these ones, the Phonetics and Phonology are the branches that studies the language at it's most basic level: the production of the sounds that compromises it.  Although both are similar and overlaps in various areas and definitions, their focus is different.

The Phonetics particularly studies the sounds that constitutes the language, including their production by the speaker (Articulatory phonetics), their acoustic properties and transmission (Acoustic phonetics) and their reception and perception by the listener (Auditory phonetics). It's unit is phone.

The Phonology insteads studies organization, behavior of the speech sounds and their systematic organization for each the different languages. It's unit is the phoneme.

The differences between both branches become more evident when you analize their respective basic units. The phone

meanwhile the phoneme

the allophone

Phonetic Alphabets

In a attempt to classify the speech sounds, several phonetics alphabets and scripts have been created. In this section we're going to discuss the most relevant for the VOCALOID users.

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, based on the IPA, that uses ASCII characters and 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 symbols of the Phonetic System are based on this transcription.