An oral consonant is a consonant sound in speech that is made by allowing air to escape from the mouth. To create an intended oral consonant sound, the entire mouth plays a role in modifying the air's passageway. This rapid modification of the air passageway using the tongue and lips makes changes to the waveform of the sound by compressing and expanding the air. In addition to the nose and mouth, the vocal cords and lungs also make a contribution to producing speech by controlling the volume (amplitude) and pitch (frequency) of the sound. The vast majority of consonants are oral consonants. The others are nasal consonants. Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... In phonetics and phonology, a phone is a speech sound considered as a physical event without regard to its place in the sound system semantics of a language. ... One might be looking for the academic discipline of communications. ... Waveform quite literally means the shape and form of a signal, such as a wave moving across the surface of water, or the vibration of a plucked string. ... Laryngoscopic view of the vocal folds. ... The heart and lungs (from an older edition of Grays Anatomy) The lung is an organ belonging to the respiratory system and interfacing to the circulatory system of air-breathing vertebrates. ... Amplitude is a nonnegative scalar measure of a waves magnitude of oscillation. ... In music, pitch is the perception of the frequency of a note. ... Sine waves of various frequencies; the lower waves have higher frequencies than those above. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ...

See also

• manner of articulation
• list of phonetics topics