The icophone is an instrument of
speech synthesis conceived by
Émile Leipp in 1964 and used for
synthesizing the
French language. The two first icophones were made in the laboratory of physical mechanics of
Saint-Cyr-l'École
Saint-Cyr-l'École () is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the centre of Paris.
It used to host the training school for officers of the French army, the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr (ESM), which w ...
.
The principle of the icophone is the representation of the sound by a
spectrograph. The
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 ...
analyzes a word, a phrase, or more generally a sound, and shows the distribution of the different frequencies with their relative intensities. The first machines to synthesize words were made by displaying the form of the spectrogram on a transparent tape, which controls a series of
oscillators following the presence or absence of a black mark on the tape. Leipp succeeded in decomposing the segments of a spoken sound phenomenon, and in synthesizing them from a very simplified display.
[.]
References
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Acoustics
Signal processing
Time–frequency analysis