An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech (2007)

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave-speech/

by codezero • 11 years ago

63 16 11 years ago

mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

hellofunk• 11 years ago

Crazy. As I listened to each example of the sin waves repeatedly, they went from gibberish to perfect sensical English. I think I sensed my neural nets learning the proper outcome from the same inputs. I think I am a machine.

profinger• 11 years ago

And now you're self aware!

alexnking• 11 years ago

Did anyone else understand the first sample without knowing you had to hear the clear version first?

hamiltonkibbe• 11 years ago

Yes

gpvos• 11 years ago

Only the last one, but I guess that's not bad for a non-native English speaker.

kator2• 11 years ago

Took me three tries but my wife got it on the first listen.

mrec• 11 years ago

Yes, but only after 2-3 listens.

wwweston• 11 years ago

Ditto -- took me two listens to get half of it, a third listen to understand fully.

ArekDymalski• 11 years ago

Yes, except one word. But I'm not a native speaker.

janzer• 11 years ago

Yes, I skipped the text at first and wanting to see what this sine wave speech sounded like just clicked on the first sample. I understood all but a word or two on the first play through. After reading the text I seem to do about the same on the other samples as well.

Interestingly for me, although standard hearing tests show I have good hearing (somewhat above average for my age despite experiencing minor tinnitus) I seem to be worse than normal at understanding speech in noisy environments (e.g. near loud engines).

wanderfowl2• 11 years ago

Sine wave speech is an example I use in my early Linguistics classes to reinforce the position that speech perception is basically magic. Absolutely incredible that it works.

xecax• 11 years ago

It's a fantastic example, isn't it? I had to give a lightning presentation about a topic in linguistics for a class and the SWS synthesis demonstration grabbed the crowd's attention like nothing else.

wanderfowl2• 11 years ago

Yeah, it's a real crowd pleaser, particularly if you play the individual components of the signal one-at-a-time first, so they hear nothing linguistic, and then combined, language!

It so nicely captures one of the key takeaways from my own line of research, which focuses on our robustness, as listeners, to problems and variability in the signal.

kator2• 11 years ago

My wife picked them out almost instantly, it took me a couple rounds. I wonder if there is a gender difference or other things at play there.

mtinkerhess• 11 years ago

Here's a similar method using a piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4

mlady• 11 years ago

This seems like a principle that we've probably all experienced before with songs.

Just think of the last song you didn't know the words to and had to look up the lyrics. Next time you heard it, you heard the words clearer because you knew what you were looking for!

I experience this all the time and for years have just mumbled along to some parts to my favorite songs until I actually cared enough to see what they were saying.

An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech (2007)

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