The pattern playback is an early talking device that was built by Dr.

Franklin S. Cooper Franklin Seaney Cooper (April 29, 1908 – February 20, 1999) was an American physicist and American inventor, inventor who was a pioneer in speech researc Biography He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinoi ...

and his colleagues, including John M. Borst and

Caryl Haskins Caryl Parker Haskins (1908–2001) was an American scientist, author, inventor, philanthropist, governmental adviser and pioneering entomologist in the study of ant biology. Along with Franklin S. Cooper, he founded the Haskins Laboratories, a ...

, at

Haskins Laboratories Haskins Laboratories, Inc. is an independent 501(c) non-profit corporation, founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut, since 1970. Haskins has formal affiliation agreements with both Yale University and the University of Connecticut; ...

in the late 1940s and completed in 1950. There were several different versions of this hardware device. Only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a

spectrogram A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. When applied to an audio signal, spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data are represen ...

back into sound. Using this device,

Alvin Liberman Alvin Meyer Liberman (; May 10, 1917 – January 13, 2000) was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Liberman was an American psychologist. His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of psychological research in speech perception. Biography Liberman rece ...

, Frank Cooper, and Pierre Delattre (later joined by

Katherine Safford Harris Katherine Safford Harris'is a noted psychologist and speech scientist. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Speech and Hearing at the CUNY Graduate Centerbr>and a member of the Board of Directorof Haskins Laboratories. She is also the former ...

Leigh Lisker Leigh Lisker (December 7, 1918 – March 24, 2006) was an eminent American linguist and phonetician. Most of his career was spent at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor and then emeritus professor of linguistics. Dr. Lisker re ...

, and others) were able to discover acoustic cues for the perception of

phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

segments (consonants and vowels). This research was fundamental to the development of modern techniques of

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

reading machine A reading machine is a piece of assistive technology that allows blind people to access printed materials. It scans text, converts the image into text by means of optical character recognition and uses a speech synthesizer to read out what it has f ...

s for the blind, the study of

speech perception Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by wh ...

and

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

, and the development of the

motor theory of speech perception The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates. It originally cl ...

. To create sound, the pattern playback machine uses an arc light source which is directed against a rotating disk with 50 concentric tracks whose transparencies vary systematically in order to produce 50 harmonics of a fundamental frequency. The light is further projected against a

whose reflectance corresponds to the sound pressure level of the partial of the signal, and is then directed towards a photovoltaic cell by which the light variation is converted into sound pressure variations. The pattern playback was last used in an experimental study by

Robert Remez Robert Remez is an American experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist, and is Professor of Psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University and Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Language & Cognition (founded in 2000). His teach ...

in 1976. The pattern playback now resides in the Museum at

New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,02 ...

. The technique of pattern playback also now refers, more generally, to algorithms or techniques for converting

s, cochleagrams, and correlograms from pictures back into sounds.

Digital pattern playback

In the 1970s, digital pattern playbacks began to supplant the earlier version. An early prototype was developed by Patrick Nye,

Philip Rubin Philip E. Rubin (born May 22, 1949) is an American cognitive scientist, technologist, and science administrator known for raising the visibility of behavioral and cognitive science, neuroscience, and ethical issues related to science, techno ...

, and colleagues at

. It combined a "Ubiquitous Spectrum Analyze

for automatic spectral analysis, along with a

VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The VA ...

GT-40 display processor for graphic manipulation of the displayed spectrogram, a form of "synthesis by art", and subsequent re-synthesis using a 40 channel filter bank. This hybrid hardware/software digital pattern playback was eventually replaced at

by the

HADES Hades (; grc-gre, ᾍδης, Háidēs; ), in the ancient Greek religion and myth, is the god of the dead and the king of the underworld, with which his name became synonymous. Hades was the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea, although this also ...

analysis and display system, designed by

, and implemented in Fortran on the

family of computers. A more modern version has been described by Arai and colleague

An on-line demonstration is availabl

References

Bibliography

* Cooper, F.S., Liberman, A. M., & Borst, J. M., The interconversion of audible and visible patterns as a basis for research in the perception of speech. ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'', 1951, 37, 318-325. * Cooper, Franklin S., Delattre, Pierre C., Liberman, A. M., Borst, J. M. & Gerstman, L. J., Some experiments on the perception of synthetic speech sounds. ''The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'', 1952, 24, 597-606. * Cooper, Franklin S., Some instrumental aids to research on speech. In ''Report of the fourth annual round table meeting on linguistics and language teaching''. Washington, D.C.: Institute of Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University, 1953, 46-53. * J. M. Borst, The use of spectrograms for speech analysis and synthesis, ''J. Audio Eng. Soc.'', 4, 14-23, 1956. * Liberman, Alvin M., Some results of research on speech perception. ''The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'', 1957, 29, 117-123. * Remez, Robert E., Adaptation of the category boundary between speech and nonspeech: A case against feature detectors. ''Cognitive Psychology'', 1979, 11, 38-57. *

Malcolm Slaney Malcolm Slaney is an American electrical engineer, whose research has focused on machine perception and multimedia analysis. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for "contributions to perceptual signal processing and tomographic imaging". He is a consulti ...

. Pattern Playback from 1950 to 1995. ''Proceedings of the 1995 IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Conference''. October 22–25, 1995, Vancouver, Canada. * Malcolm Slaney, Pattern Playback in the 90's, in ''Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 7'', Gerald Tesauro, David Touretzky, and Todd Leen (eds.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995. * T. Arai, K. Yasu and T. Goto, Digital pattern playback, ''Proc. Autumn Meet. Acoust. Soc. Jpn''., 429-430, 2005. * T. Arai, K. Yasu and T. Goto, Digital pattern playback: Converting spectrograms to sound for educational purposes, ''Acoust. Sci. & Tech.'', 27(6), 393-395, 2006 {{Speech synthesis American inventions Phonetics Speech recognition Speech synthesis

Digital pattern playback

See also

References

Bibliography