The material for the term will cover the following main aspects:
The philosophy is to explain signals from a functional point of view, that is, in relation to the systems which generate and transform them, and the characteristic or transfer functions of these systems.
First an overview of kinds of system is given, moving from the practical to the more theoretical kind of system. Second, the basic kinds of signal are described, followed by a review of the units of measurement needed for describing signals in detail. Fourth, a detailed account of the main operations on signals in the time domain is given and, fifth, transformations on signals from the time domain into other domains, such as the frequency and phase domains, are described.
The following sections cover three major facets of acoustic phonetics, namely the acoustics of consonants, the acoustics of vowels, the acoustics of transitions between consonants and vowels, and the acoustics of prosody.
The last set of sections covers acoustics in speech technology, in particular automatic speech recognition, and speech synthesis.