Visible Speech

The system is composed of symbols that show the position and movement of the throat, tongue, and lips as they produce the sounds of language, and it is a type of phonetic notation.

[3] Melville's works on Visible Speech became highly notable, and were described by Édouard Séguin as being "...a greater invention than the telephone by his son, Alexander Graham Bell".

[5] A person reading a piece of text handwritten in Melville Bell's system of characters could accurately reproduce a sentence the way it would be spoken by someone with a foreign or regional accent.

The system is useful not only because its visual representation mimicks the physical act of speaking, but because it does so, these symbols may be used to write words in any language, hence the name "Universal Alphabetics".

Instead, Graham Bell's system, developed at his Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., involved the use of a spectrogram, a device that makes "visible records of the frequency, intensity, and time analysis of short samples of speech".