Subject: ARO highlights From: "Edward M. Burns" <pwa(at)U.WASHINGTON.EDU> Date: Tue, 15 Feb 1994 10:05:41 -0800I'd have to say the shrimp at the 46th St Beachbar and the BT party. Also, Bob Shannon's demo that you only need 3 or 4 (crude) channels for basically perfect speech recognition, and the clear implication that the sophisticated signal-processing capabilities of the auditory system (including the HYPOTHETICAL cochlear amplifier) have evolved not for speech, but for music. Ed Burns Return-Path: owner-auditory(at)VM1.MCGILL.CA Received: by media.mit.edu (5.57/DA1.0.4.amt) id AA24606; Wed, 16 Feb 94 15:30:43 -0500 Message-Id: <9402162030.AA24606(at)media.mit.edu> Received: from VM1.MCGILL.CA by VM1.MCGILL.CA (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 2290; Wed, 16 Feb 94 15:27:33 EST Received: from VM1.MCGILL.CA by VM1.MCGILL.CA (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 6754; Wed, 16 Feb 94 15:27:30 EST Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 12:28:47 PST Reply-To: bregman(at)CCRMA.STANFORD.EDU Sender: Research in auditory perception <AUDITORY(at)VM1.MCGILL.CA> From: bregman(at)CCRMA.STANFORD.EDU Subject: How much precision needed? X-To: auditory(at)vm1.mcgill.ca To: Multiple recipients of list AUDITORY <AUDITORY(at)VM1.MCGILL.CA> ---------- > Also, Bob Shannon's demo that you only need 3 or 4 (crude) channels for > basically perfect speech recognition, and the clear implication that the > sophisticated signal-processing capabilities of the auditory system > (including the HYPOTHETICAL cochlear amplifier) have evolved not for speech, > but for music. > > Ed Burns I that Ed is joking, but there is a serious point behind his joke. Was the speech recorded in a background of silence? I suspect that as soon as you put speech in a background of other sounds, noise, and reverberation, the "sophisticated signal-processing capabilities of the auditory system" will be necessary to achieve good performance. The high-level performance with a informationally-reduced signal in a simple background is probably due to the redundancy of speech and the listener's understanding of the constraints imposed by the articulatory process and by the structure of the language and the meaning of the message. In short, the listener can profit from the many sources of redundancy in the signal. I suspect that you could recognize a piece of music through 3 or 4 channels too, if it was as familiar to you as the words and phrases of your language are. You wouldn't get the timbral nuances of the music, and you would have to fill in some aspects of the music from memory, but this is probably what happens in the speech case too. Similar phenomena occur in vision. We can recognize simple pen drawings (sometimes simplified to the level of cartoons) of people and objects that we are familiar with. We can get depth from a few lines in a drawing. Then why do we need the "sophisticated signal- processing capabilities" of the VISUAL system? Al Bregman From owner-auditory(at)VM1.MCGILL.CA Wed Feb 16 15:44:12 1994 Received: by media.mit.edu (5.57/DA1.0.4.amt) id AA26564; Wed, 16 Feb 94 15:44:12 -0500 Message-Id: <9402162044.AA26564(at)media.mit.edu> Received: from VM1.MCGILL.CA by VM1.MCGILL.CA (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 2498; Wed, 16 Feb 94 15:42:11 EST Received: from VM1.MCGILL.CA by VM1.MCGILL.CA (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 7354; Wed, 16 Feb 94 15:42:08 EST Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 12:39:31 -0800 Reply-To: John Lazzaro <lazzaro(at)CS.BERKELEY.EDU> Sender: Research in auditory perception <AUDITORY(at)VM1.MCGILL.CA> From: John Lazzaro <lazzaro(at)CS.BERKELEY.EDU> Subject: Re: How much precision needed? X-To: AUDITORY(at)VM1.MCGILL.CA To: Multiple recipients of list AUDITORY <AUDITORY(at)VM1.MCGILL.CA> > [ bregman(at)CCRMA.STANFORD.EDU ] > I suspect that you could recognize a piece of music through 3 or 4 > channels too, if it was as familiar to you as the words and phrases > of your language are. As apartment-dwellers of the world can verify! I've become an expert in recognizing heavy-metal songs by the signal energy present under 120Hz since our new neighbors moved in last year :-)