This course is divided into three parts, introducing three essential components of sounds that are central to our language, tones, vowels, and consonants. For each component, we will have four sessions. The first session will be devoted to a general introduction of the concept, and the overall type and token frequency in a spoken speech corpus. The second session will focus on the articulatory/acoustic properties of the components. The third session will focus on how one can manipulate the components via modern speech technology in order to perform perception tests. Finally, the fourth session will focus on how these elements interact with prosodic factors in a entential context. To facilitate cross-linguistic comparisons, both Mandarin and Min will be used as the language of study.