Expanding Phonetics

The optimistic title of my contribution to this Festschrift is supposed to underline the substantial growth in Phonetic Sciences as for instance reflected by comparing the program size and the number of participants of the 1st International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) organized in 1932 in Amsterdam with that of the 10th ICPhS that was again organized in the Netherlands, this time in Utrecht in August 1983, and then with that of the 15th and most recent one in September 2003 in Barcelona. It is also meant to be a somewhat cynical title, reflecting the fact that the Chair of Phonetics in Utrecht, that was so capably occupied by prof. Antonie Cohen and then by prof. Sieb Nooteboom, will not automatically be continued after Sieb’s retirement. Worldwide, the multidisciplinary field of Phonetics is expanding in many directions, whereas in the Netherlands the number of students that choose this specialization is declining. However, optimists emphasize that perhaps only the name tag differs and that actually Phonetics is an indispensable element in the web of interdisciplinarity surrounding Linguistics, Experimental Psychology, Speech and Language Technology, Signal processing, ENT, Audiology and the like