Automatic Determination of Time Direction in Speech
Edward P. Neuburg · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1974
In research leading to the automatic extraction of speech parameters, some tasks are best done on a computer very differently from the way people do them. In fact there are some speech tasks that a computer can do better than a human, and even some that a computer can do that a human cannot do at all, generally because there is no evolutionary reason why a human should be able to perform such a task. An example of this type of task is determining whether a passage of recorded speech is being played back forwards or backwards. There are passages for which a human finds it difficult or even impossible to make a determination, while a simple computer program has no difficulty at all. Examples of such speech passages are given, and simple methods of determining direction described. The intended implication of the paper is that lines of research or justifications of projects should not be overly influenced by how or how well people perform speech tasks.