

Mumbling Is a Data-Compression Trick - jimiwen
http://nautil.us/blog/mumbling-isnt-a-sign-of-lazinessits-a-clever-data_compression-trick

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jkgeyti
Audio compression and encoding is such an interesting area, and I'd recommend
anyone to read up on the basics. I had a naive idea about compression being
something-about-cutting-waveforms or something like that, and had no idea that
principles of vocoding was used to encode phone conversations - we're
essentially encoding speech by passing artificial air through a software model
of an artificial human speech system, and decoding it by blowing the air back
out the other way! The compressed data is essentially not even the sound
itself, but parameters about the artificial tongue, mouth etc.

I know this is extremely dumbed down, but every once in a while you realise
there's a subject out there you know nothing about, that's just so interesting
to learn a bit about - and speech encoding definitely checks that box for me!

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Artemis2
Non-mobile link: [http://nautil.us/blog/mumbling-isnt-a-sign-of-
lazinessits-a-...](http://nautil.us/blog/mumbling-isnt-a-sign-of-lazinessits-
a-clever-data_compression-trick)

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jimiwen
not all compression are equal, I guess from the senses there are perceptual vs
compression rate to consider. For language, it's a cognition issue.

