Claire Boilley#OutOfContextScience just for fun! Today: unicorns against education. 🦄🚫🎓
Sentence firstUncanny Vowelly
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This fascinating video has been doing the rounds over the last couple of weeks.* The good people at Speculative Grammarian brought it to my attention, and I went looking for more information. The bizarre device is obviously a mechanical model of human speech organs, but my hunch that it is used in phonetic research was a little off the mark. It is, in a sense, but this is not its primary purpose.
The apparatus, called a Robotic Voice Simulator, was designed by engineers at Kagawa University in Japan to help hearing-impaired people improve their vocalisation skills. Popular Science has a short article with the splendid headline “Moaning Rubber Robot Mouth Simulates Human Voices, Fuels Our Human Nightmares”. The simulator certainly has a creepy quality, but we should not overlook its potential to provoke wonder and even giggles.
Some people discussing it have referred to the Uncanny Valley, a hypothetical psychological phenomenon which probably didn’t pose a problem with mechanical speaking machines throughout history, but which is becoming more and more relevant especially in robotics, owing to the increasing sophistication of modelling, both digital and mechanical.
Training of speech articulation using a Robotic Voice Simulator
The video broached my radar only recently, but the people responsible for the simulator – Hideyuki Sawada, Mitsuki Kitani, and Yasumori Hayashi – had their work published in the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology more than two years ago. Their very interesting paper, “A Robotic Voice Simulator and the Interactive Training for Hearing-Impaired People”, is available here. The authors describe the development of a “talking and singing robot which adaptively learns the vocalization skill by means of an auditory feedback learning” (my emphasis).
The device’s structure consists mainly of “an air pump, artificial vocal cords, a resonance tube, a nasal cavity, and a microphone connected to a sound analyser”; these parts achieve a rough structural correspondence with human vocal organs. The simulator “listens” to subjects and maps their vocalisation with the help of an “auditory feedback learning algorithm”. Comparing this with normal speech allows for interactive mimicry-based training, which in some cases leads to an improvement in articulation.
PopSci concludes:
It’s also worth noting that the original source mentions that the robot can sing as well as speak. Now if only the kind folks at Kagawa University would release that video already.
Duly seconded. Remixes are already appearing on YouTube, but they don’t come straight from the robot’s mouth. I want to hear that intense metallo-nasal drone bring sweet melodies to life.
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* I’ve embedded a little-watched version and ignored the two popular uploads, because these latter contain on-screen links and intrusive speech balloons.
#engineering #language #languageNews #medicine #phonetics #robotics #science #speech #UncannyValley #video
𝔸𝕟𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕥 𝕊𝕠𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕤 🔉@benjamingeer @NilaJones @ShaulaEvans
Part of the explanation is that pronunciations have changed (diverged) over time, whereas spellings have been slower to change. For example, Old English, Old French, Old High German and Latin all had apical trilled [r], but words with that sound came to be pronounced various different ways. So the present-day variation is not totally random. Also, within each language there are other factors leading to a certain amount of variation. Variation and change are always with us, so it's unwise to expect constancy and uniformity in pronunciation and other aspects of language.
@knizer
The IPA is founded on articulation, so to get really good at reading (and writing) transcriptions, it is advisable to focus on *producing* (i.e. speaking aloud) the sounds of all the letters. There are several “clickable” IPA charts online. One of the best is https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-charts/
as it also has MRI and ultrasound videos of the articulations.
A long list of other online resources is at
https://teaching.ncl.ac.uk/ipa/links.html
Stan CareyDid people notice the Great Vowel Shift? (23 mins.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8SD60KpJvA
#language #phonology #history #phonetics #speech #linguistics #accents #LanguageChange
Did People Notice the Great Vowel Shift?
Dani (
Antifascista)@crmsnbleyd
Right, some German dialects (like Frankonian here at my place) lack 'voiceless plosives' and replace them with 'unaspirated, partially voiced plosives'.
Hence: 'Gadse' instead of 'Katze'.
Sharing the best of humanity with the world, one story at a time.The 50 names proven to sound most beautiful, according to science
Great question! As so often with English spelling there is not a simple rule, but there is a rational explanation, mainly down to the alphabet having way fewer vowel letters than the number of distinct vowel sounds. “Identity” and “identify” are both borrowed and adapted from (an older form of) French. Identity is from “identité”, the final é being similar to English lax [ɪ], typically spelled -y word finally. Identify is from “identifier”; dropping the French verb suffix -er gives final tense vowel [i] (pronounced like “ee”), which is most similar to Middle English long vowel [i:], also spelled as -y because English spelling doesn't record all the pronunciation differences. Since then, the long vowels in English have shifted in their pronunciation, long [i:] becoming the diphthong [aɪ], as in the final -y of “identify”. (More detail about this Great Vowel Shift here: https://www.ancientsounds.net/GVS.html)
cf indentifi-cation, with short [ɪ].
W6KMEI just sent this wonderful RobWords video to my radio club, but I bet a lot of people here would enjoy it, especially the non-hams. The ICAO Spelling Alphabet (most people call it the NATO phonetic alphabet, even though it is neither) is a wonder of linguistics, disguised as something extremely simple.
The genius logic of the NATO phonetic alphabet
Chenzi XuWe presented our #ManyTones project at the 2025 #BigTeamScience Conference. We talked about project background, pilot study, and challenges. The slides are available at https://chenchenzi.github.io/manytones/projects/1_project/. Feel free to check them out 👀