Subject: Re: Talking piano From: Peter Meijer <feedback@xxxxxxxx> Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:11:19 +0200 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>I enjoyed this cool demonstration of what I consider to be additive synthesis using repeated piano tones instead of pure sines in sounding a human speech spectrogram. The human brain is extremely tolerant to speech distortions, as was also nicely demonstrated long ago by 3-tone sinewave speech, http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Sine-wave_speech so why not 88-tone piano speech. Apparently one can also get away with replacing the sine waves of additive synthesis by piano tones while ignoring any phase relationships across the spectrum (and accepting the newly added but now "meaningless" or "spurious" phase relationships and amplitude envelope that arise from each piano tone). And pianists: don't despair, I can imagine that a further simplification to 10-finger piano speech might also work well enough, by analogy to the 3-tone sinewave speech results... :-) Best regards, Peter Meijer Seeing with Sound - The vOICe http://www.seeingwithsound.com