Topic-012: Introduction to Phonetics Phonetics, as a discipline, is the study of human speech sounds. It includes the understanding of how sounds are articulated using mouth, nose, teeth and tongue, and how ears hear those sounds and can tell them apart. In phonetics, the physical properties (such as the waveform of each sound) can also be analyzed with the help of computer programs (e.g., Praat). There are three major types of phonetics articulatory phonetics, acoustics phonetics and auditory phonetics.