Reddit reviews Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics

As mentioned elsewhere, Ladefoged's books are good, as is his old companion website. Johnson's Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics is also useful.

Once you have basic knowledge of articulation and acoustics, wavesurfer and praat are both amazing (and free) tools for doing acoustic phonetics.

>... syntax, phonetics, and semantics...

here is an entire book on it.

[here] (http://savethevowels.org/praat/UsingPraatforLinguisticResearchLatest.pdf) is a very long journal article on the use of praat in linguistic research.

Here is a youtube video showing some of the basic uses of praat in a linguistics context, for identifying vowels, similar to what I was trying to do.

Here is the wiki for acoustic phonetics, the subfield of phonetics that would do recording analysis.