Remaking Speech
Homer Dudley · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1939
Speech has been remade from a buzzer-like tone and a hiss-like noise with automatic control of the pitch and timbre by the talker's speech that is being remade. The newly created speech may be altered from the original in a variety of ways since the fundamental variables of speech are under experimental control between the steps of speech analyzing and synthesizing that together remake the speech. The demonstrations will show in detail the steps in remaking speech as well as the effects of changing various elements. Included among these demonstrations will be the automatic raising and lowering of pitch, changing the octave range of pitch, reversing the inflection, removing the melody from song, transforming voiced speech to a whisper, the relative contributions of the buzz and hiss to the remade speech, etc. The demonstrations will show some striking characteristics of speech such as its recreation under the control of currents too low in frequency to be audible and the use of timbre for intelligibility and of inflection for emotional content. The synthesizing process here used provided the basis for the synthesis of speech by the manipulation of keys as accomplished in the Voder, one of the Bell System's exhibits at this year's World's Fair.