Speech is the primary medium of language.  It uses sound, produced by the vocal organs and perceived by the hearing system.  Phonetics is the study of speech.

Reading and writing, though culturally important, are secondary to speech.  All normal humans produce and perceive speech, but reading and writing have to be taught; written language is a relatively recent invention and, until recent times, literacy was no more common than the ability to read and write music is today.  

The sounds of speech can be analysed both auditorily (by ear) and acoustically (by computer).  In auditory analysis, phoneticians often use phonetic symbols; the most widely used symbols are those of the International Phonetic Association (IPA).  I myself was a contributor to the Kiel revision of the IPA symbols.

The graphic at the top of this site shows an acoustic image of my name, known as a spectrogram.  Superimposed on the spectrogram is a transcription of my name in IPA symbols.  See the links page for Paul Meier’s excellent online audio-visual IPA charts.

A very compact introduction to vowel articulation is provided on the site of top Hollywood dialect coach Joel Goldes (see links).