Representing sound spectra as sound?

[Alain de Cheveigne <alain@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just came across the following message in the comp.speech
newsgroup.  I think the idea of representing sound spectrograms
in a format other than visual (possibly as sound!) might be of
double interest to this group.

Alain de Cheveigne.

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Path:
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From: 6500reng@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Robert Englebretson)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Acoustic Analysis and visually impaired access
Date: 28 Sep 1993 06:37:20 GMT
Organization: University of California, Santa Barbara
Lines: 33
Distribution: comp
Message-ID: <288m30$g6m@hub.ucsb.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu


Hi!

I'm a grad student studying linguistics at the University of California at
Santa Barbara.  I am also totally blind.  As a linguist, my research interests
are leading me to do work on speech prosody and phonetics.  Unfortunately, I'm
not getting very far because the tools I need for research are inaccessible to
me as a blind person using conventional speech or Braille output (Yes, I'm very
familiiar with applications for speech synthesis and TTS.)

Anyone know anything about acoustic analysis programs, and if/how I, as a blind
computer user, can access them?  Examples of such programs which we are using
in our lab are: CECIL and Speech Science Lab for the IBM, and Mac Speech Lab
for the Macintosh.  (We also have a program for a Sun, but I'm not sure which
one.)  Because such displays are highly visual and graphically oriented
(frequency traces, etc.), there is no way of using conventional speech or
Braille screen access software to read them.

Is anyone out there (or does anyone know of) blind computer users who've had
success working with such programs who could provide suggestions as to how to
make them accessible?  Are there any such programs which present spectrographic
data in quantitative rather than visual format?

I haven't had much luck posting such technical questions to the newsgroups for
blind/visually impaired computer users, but I thought someone on this group
might have some ideas.  If so, please contact me via E-mail.

Thanks for any input!

                         Robert Englebretson
                         (6500reng@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu)
                         (6500reng@ucsbuxa.bitnet)
                         (Phone: 805- 968-5756)

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