September 28, 2007
Sine-Wave Speech and Perceptual Insight
Posted by ryan at 11:45 AM in science . | 0 Comments
Sine-wave speech is a form of artificially degraded speech first developed by Robert Remez and Philip Rubin at Haskins Laboratory.
In this work, Remez and colleagues demonstrated a dramatic change in the way in which sine-wave speech sentences are perceived, depending on listener's specific prior knowledge. For instance, listen to this sound:
Most naive listeners here this as a set of simultaneous whistles, or science fiction sounds. However, for listeners that have previously heard this sound:
Listening to the sine-wave speech sound again produces a very different percept of a fully intelligible spoken sentence. This dramatic change in how perception is an example of "perceptual insight" or pop-out.