One of the challenges of current research into speech communication is that of effectively using the power of the digital computer to both organize data and to extract relevant relationships by computational methods. Whilst considerable progress has been made in the analysis and synthesis of the acoustics of speech and in understanding the perceptual mechanisms at work in human perception of speech, there has been a paucity of relations between such knowledge and the description of speech by the traditional discipline of phonetics. One significant factor in this situation is the lack of an effective way for the speech scientist to code the descriptions of the phonetician in a way that preserves the richness of description and accuracy of judgement attained by a highly trained ear and expressed in specialized phonetic scripts. It is the intent of this paper to propose a tool that could provide improved communication between the two disciplines.