What are phones?

Phones are units that represent pronunciation of words. The standard system for representing phones is the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. The most common computational system for transcription of English is the ARPAbet, which conveniently uses ASCII symbols.

How consonants and vowels be defined based on how they are produced articulatorily by the voice organs?

Consonants are defined in terms of their place and manner of articulation and voicing; vowels by their height, backness, and roundness.

How can speech sounds be described?

Frequency, amplitude, or their perceptual correlates, pitch and loudness.

What is the spectrum?

The spectrum of a sound describes its different frequency components. While some phonetic properties are recognizable from the waveform, both humans and machines rely on spectral analysis for phone detection.

What is a spectrogram?

A spectrogram is a plot of a spectrum over time.

What are formants?

The characteristic harmonics that describe the vowels.