

An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech (2007) - codezero
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave-speech/

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

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hellofunk
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.

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profinger
And now you're self aware!

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wanderfowl
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.

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xecax
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.

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wanderfowl
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.

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

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hamiltonkibbe
Yes

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

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mlady
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.

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kator
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.

