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Re: piano sounds to speech and whisper magic




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