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New Dimensions in Voice Simulation
| Article
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20515 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
2,911 Words |
| Author
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Ingo R. Titze
Ingo R. Titze is director of the National Center for Voice
and Speech, and professor in the Department of Speech
Pathology and Audiology at the University of Iowa. He
combines his educational background as an electrical engineer
and physicist with a lifelong interest in the human voice. |
Please stop, Dave . . . Dave, I'm afraid," uttered Hal, the computer, in the futuristic move 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was the first exposure of many to a synthetic voice. Since the movie's release in 1968, however, computerized or synthesized voice has entered other areas of everyday life: Toys speak to children; automobiles verbally reprimand drivers; telephone operators are no longer people. One wonders if speaking is genuinely as unique to humans as we have assumed it to be.
Speech is the product of a sophisticated process of articulation imposed on a more primitive sound production process called voicing, or vocalization. Voicing is certainly not unique to humans. The lion's roar and the cow's moo are among hundreds of distinctive vocalizations by animals. One common element between human and animal vocalization is that sound is produced in the larynx (voice box).
In humans, voicing includes laughing, shouting, crying, singing, moaning, and sighing. These vocal expressions reflect out emotions, our state of mind, and often, our well-being. The first cry of a newborn has long been heralded as the definitive statement of life, and an infant's expressions of hunger and pain are primarily vocal.
Since voicing is the precursor of speech, the cooing and babbling of an infant are obvious signs that speech is developing. By learning to combine voice with other sounds such as hisses, clicks, and pops in the mouth, and by modifying these sounds with the articulators such as lips, teeth, tongue, and soft palate (or velum), humans are able to communicate. To transmit information rapidly and unambiguously with spoken language requires a large inventory of sounds (phonemes).
How Speech Synthesis Emerged
The science and technology of speech synthesis developed in response to the need to transmit and store spoken messages. In particular, the telephone and broadcast industries have sought to economize on the amount of information transmitted over a voice channel. Telecommunications engineers struggled with the problem of moving a message from point A to point B in the most efficient way. This resulted in a process know as speech compression. A code was developed to abbreviate the raw acoustic signal before its transmission. Speech synthesis, then, involved the reassembling of the original acoustic signal from the code after transmission.
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