Ian Maddieson is a linguist at UC Berkeley, an Adjunct Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, and vice-president of the International Phonetic Association. He wrote the books Patterns of Sounds and Sounds of the World's Languages.
Based on data from about 400 languages, the book describes the known contrasting phonetic categories (ways in which the phonemic sounds of the human languages may differ)
Ian Maddieson , Patterns of Sounds,
Cambridge University Press, 1984, ISBN 0521265363
Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 0521113261
The book analyzes frequencies and distributions of the phonemic sounds among languages. The results are based on UPSID (the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database).