Audio library for all IPA vowels and consonants

Question

Wikipedia has a pretty good intro to the IPA sounds, even some of the "click" sounds:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant

However, they don't include all the IPA sounds. Maybe they just haven't gotten to them yet. For example, the glottalized clicks, the nasal clicks, and the nasal vowels aren't in there. There are a few others that aren't in there as well, don't remember which ones.

Wondering if there is an audio library for all the IPA sounds somewhere in one place.

Answer 1

The problem for many of these is the combinatorial explosion: a fairly small number of components, when they can be combined, can lead to enormous numbers of possibilities.

For example, on that vowel chart you linked, there are thirty-two symbols with associated sound files. (In theory there could be far more, since the vowel space is continuous, but I don't know of any vowel phoneme in any language that doesn't encompass at least one of those thirty-two.)

Now if you want to add in nasalization, that's thirty-two more, for sixty-four total. Add in breathy voice? Now you're up to 128. Pharyngealized? 256. Tones? Far, far more. And so on and so forth.

So most resources for vowels specify the pronunciation of each part individually (mouth position, nasalization, breathy voice…) and count on the user to combine them.

Clicks pose a similar problem, since they have so many dimensions compared to pulmonic consonants: place of back articulation, place of front articulation, nasality, aspiration, voicing…this is the reason why the IPA doesn't attempt to assign a new symbol to each click consonant, instead relying on combinations of existing symbols and diacritics.