The present set of symbols recommended by the International Phonetic Association had its origins nearly 100 years ago, shortly after the Association was founded in 1886. It was revised many times in its early years, but in the last 40 years there have been few changes. As a result, it is now time for the Association to turn to this matter again. But before we do so, we would like to make it clear that in our view the Association should be concerned with far more than the management of a set of symbols. Just as no university course in phonetics should limit itself to teaching students how to make phonetic transcriptions, so equally the Association is concerned with the whole science of phonetics. Phoneticians are not just people who can hear and produce a great variety of speech sounds. They are scholars who have studied the entire process of speech production and perception. They know how speech sounds form the medium of spoken language, and they continually relate their work to other fields such as general linguistics. They also know something about the practical applications of their work, ranging from pronunciation teaching to automatic speech recognition. Phonetics is an academic discipline, and the International Phonetic Association is the organization of the group of scholars who are enaged in that discipline.