#reading machine

An interesting article about what early attempts to invent a reading machine taught us about how speech sounds are produced. Excerpt: 

Since the early years of the twentieth century, there had been attempts to build reading machines — devices that converted the written word into sounds. The machines weren’t readers themselves; they neither recognized words nor synthesized speech. They merely converted pictures into other sensory modalities, like raised bumps (like the device of Gustav Tauschek, below) or noises. There was every confidence that, with the reading machine executed correctly and enough training time allowed, a man or woman of average intelligence could learn a sound alphabet. By associating distinct noises with letters, they could begin to assemble words in their heads. Intuitively, it was no different than learning to use an optical alphabet — more commonly spoken, the written word. Brains that could read by sight, could probably read by sound.

[...]

Optimism for the reading machine was high at the outset. Alvin Liberman wrote that “…the perception of speech was thought to be no different from the perception of other sounds, except, as there was, in speech, a learned association between perceived sound and the name of the corresponding phoneme. Why not expect, then, that arbitrary but distinctive sounds would serve as well as speech, provided only that users had sufficient training?”

“Given that expectation, we were ill prepared for the disappointing performance of the nonspeech signals our early machines produced,” he concluded. The sound-alphabet approach did not yield easy success. Participants who interpreted sentences played through the Optophone could not do it quickly enough to be useful- most could not “read” more than ten words a minute, which is at least twenty times slower than most sighted people can read from paper. Performance did not improve after hours of training. Nor was the slowness a result of the playback speed — when the experimenters made the Optophone faster, the letters only blurred together, making them entirely indistinct and useless to the listener. Liberman called it “an imperspicuous buzz”. [...]

Looking at spectrograms of the same phoneme (a unit of sound that distinguishes a word from another in a given language) revealed curious patterns that were at odds with the assumptions driving the reading machine. Whereas the sound alphabet had assumed that each phoneme in a word — the “d”, the “o”, and the “g” in “dog” — could be delivered separately, as its own unique segment, the spectrogram told a different story.

Consider the following classical example with spectrograms of the words “see” and “sue”:

Notice the “s” (boxed in orange) represented in the spectrograms. Before /i/, as in “see”, the consonant has a great deal of energy in the high frequencies. When the vowel that follows is /u/, as in “sue”, it is not only the vowel that changes — there is a noticeably different pattern of energy in the “s”. The acoustic signal for “s” is not a discrete segment, like a word in a letter, than can simply be slid into place besides any other sound. Just like nearly every other phoneme, its acoustics depend on its surroundings.

The phonemes blur into one another by the very nature of speech production. Even as the vocal tract is positioned to make one sound, it is prepared to produce the next. In the above example, there is less high frequency energy in the “s” in “sue” because the tongue and lip formation are already altered during production of the “s” in anticipation of the /u/.

Read the whole thing.

The Fiske Reading Machine will make books obsolete!”

Circa 1922, this is a photograph of the Fiske Reading Machine in the hand of its inventor, Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske.

Pretty much all of them are parts of book series.

In order to re-remember where I'm at in each series so as to actually know what's going on in the unread new books, I will have to re-read the previous books in each series.

All combined, that puts my tbr list at an even 60.

There are 45 days left in 2014.