This festschrift reflects the triad that Bjorn Lindblom has frequently referred to in his teaching as the corner-stones of phonetics. It combines papers from researchers in the fields of speech production, speech perception and language acquisition. The first and last contribution approach the theme from a very general perspective and form the theoretical brackets of the volume, as they are concerned with the questions as to why speech and language(s) are the way they are and how they developed to their present state. Within the theoretical frame contributions first deal with the speaker, then with prosodic phenomena and the listener, also including a paper that brings together speech and music. The following papers deal with language acquisition and finally lead to general considerations about biological factors in speech communication.