Aspects of Human Hearing

Abstract

In a naive view it seems that spoken and written words are just different ways to represent the same things. That means they are equivalent and what can be expressed in one form can also be expressed in the other form. This neglects the fact that both forms are based on quite different inherent elements. Written words are represented by letters from a finite alphabet. Spoken words are represented by signals, more precisely by stochastic processes of signals. Signal processes have a greater and broader scope than simply sequences of letters. For example, the pitch of a utterance is a psychoacoustic property of the produced signal that is characterized by the frequency, loudness, intensity or amplitude of the acoustic sound.