While perhaps not as much fun as changing piano sounds to speech, sometime ago Jim Bashford and I reported a slight of band that makes it possible to transform intelligible whispered discourse to an intelligible voiced monotone. This magic was accomplished by excising a 4 ms segment of the whispered speech and repeating it three times to produce four statements lasting 16 ms; then capturing another 4 ms of whisper which was repeated to produce another set of 4 statements, etc. The resulting voiced speech was quite intelligible despite the discard of 12 ms speech segments and the nonselective voicing of all phonemes. Presto change-o, it was possible to obtain a sex change by altering the duration of the repeated excised segments from 4 to 8 ms, and to avoid a monotone by slight variations in the durations of successive iterated captures. Reference: Warren, R.M., and Bashford, J.A., Jr. 1978. Production of white tone from white noise and voiced speech from whisper. Bulletin of Psychonomic Society, 11, 327-329. Richard M. Warren Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Department of Psychology University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee PO Box 413 Milwaukee, WI 53201 |