This text provides an introduction to the acoustic analysis and characteristics of speech sounds. The first part of the book covers aspects of the source-filter decomposition of speech, spectrographic analysis, the acoustic theory of speech production and acoustic phonetic cues. The second part is based on computational techniques for analyzing the acoustic speech signal including digital time and frequency analyzes, formant synthesis, and the linear predictive coding of speech. There is also an introductory chapter on the classification of acoustic speech signals which is relevant to aspects of automatic speech and talker recognition. Included with the book is a CD-ROM containing extensive speech corpora, the EMU speech analysis tools, extensions to the X-LISP-STAT programming language that are adapted to speech analysis, and numerous exercises that are linked to the major themes of the book and which can be run on Windows-95 and UNIX platforms. The book and CD-ROM are intended for use as teaching materials on undergraduate and postgraduate speech acoustics and experimental phonetics courses; they are also aimed at researchers from phonetics, linguistics, computer science, psychology and engineering who wish to gain an understanding of the basis of speech acoustics and its application to fields such as speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition.