An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech (2007) | Hacker News Reader

An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech (2007)

mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

63 pointscodezero16 comments

Here's a similar method using a piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4

Crazy. As I listened to each example of the sin waves repeatedly, they went from gibberish to perfect sensical English. I think I sensed my neural nets learning the proper outcome from the same inputs. I think I am a machine.

And now you're self aware!

Sine wave speech is an example I use in my early Linguistics classes to reinforce the position that speech perception is basically magic. Absolutely incredible that it works.

It's a fantastic example, isn't it? I had to give a lightning presentation about a topic in linguistics for a class and the SWS synthesis demonstration grabbed the crowd's attention like nothing else.

Yeah, it's a real crowd pleaser, particularly if you play the individual components of the signal one-at-a-time first, so they hear nothing linguistic, and then combined, language!

It so nicely captures one of the key takeaways from my own line of research, which focuses on our robustness, as listeners, to problems and variability in the signal.

Did anyone else understand the first sample without knowing you had to hear the clear version first?

Yes

Only the last one, but I guess that's not bad for a non-native English speaker.

Took me three tries but my wife got it on the first listen.

Yes, but only after 2-3 listens.

Ditto -- took me two listens to get half of it, a third listen to understand fully.

Yes, except one word. But I'm not a native speaker.

Yes, I skipped the text at first and wanting to see what this sine wave speech sounded like just clicked on the first sample. I understood all but a word or two on the first play through. After reading the text I seem to do about the same on the other samples as well.

Interestingly for me, although standard hearing tests show I have good hearing (somewhat above average for my age despite experiencing minor tinnitus) I seem to be worse than normal at understanding speech in noisy environments (e.g. near loud engines).

This seems like a principle that we've probably all experienced before with songs.

Just think of the last song you didn't know the words to and had to look up the lyrics. Next time you heard it, you heard the words clearer because you knew what you were looking for!

I experience this all the time and for years have just mumbled along to some parts to my favorite songs until I actually cared enough to see what they were saying.

My wife picked them out almost instantly, it took me a couple rounds. I wonder if there is a gender difference or other things at play there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com