Ok, first, what's IPA, please?

It's the alphabet that linguists use to transcribe speech. IPA also stands for the International Phonetics Association which you can see spelled out in the IPA at the home site:

http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html

I usually use SAMPA because not everybody can see the symbols in the Unicode range for the IPA.

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm