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Let’s see, your questions in order:
1. If by ‘scope’ you mean breadth, acoustic analysis has been and continues to be
done on several physical features of speech sounds, such as duration,
fundamental frequency, amplitude, etc. Not only on segmental vowels and
consonants: prosody has busied researchers too. To me, this is even more
relevant, in that I don’t think we can make sense of (connected) speech without
taking its suprasegmental features into account.
How you then use your acoustic findings does depend on purposes, which are
also many: to provide text-to-speech algorithms, including devising instruments
that read printed text, to build talking robots, to facilitate visual interface with
machines/computers for hearing-impaired users from acoustic/articulatory
correlates of sounds, etc.
2. Selection of PhD topics and methodologies depends on your choice of
institution and supervisor(s)/advisor(s). PhD-level research has used Praat,
Audacity and other acoustic analysis freeware.
3. Besides the ones I mention above, and if you’re thinking of practical
applications, the use of acoustic analysis in foreign language teaching/learning is
one. Just today, a colleague sent me a link to the latest issue of Language
Learning and Technology, which is all related to pronunciation, at
http://llt.msu.edu/
The first article there is by a team at the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm,
Sweden), whose phonetics department has produced an impressive amount of
work in the acoustics of speech, all with practical goals. You can check out their
website at http://www.speech.kth.se/
All this with a proviso: machines/acoustic filters don’t hear speech the way human
beings do. In particular, machines don’t know (yet?) how to “listen”, which is what
makes human beings fluent users of their languages on both the productive and
receptive ends.
Madalena
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