From: malcolm@interval.com (Malcolm Slaney)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 10:22:33 -0800
Subject: Voice Coding at the Hearing Seminar
Message-Id: <v02110100ab8a3ac75600@[192.203.7.70]>

We will be talking about voice synthesis and coding at the next two CCRMA
Hearing Seminars.  Voices are certainly special to the auditory system.
What is it about a series of blips, chirps and noises that cause them all
to fuse and let us hear the sound as a voice?  It's really quite magical.

This Thursday, Ben Gold will be describing early work on voice coding and
synthesis.  Ben Gold is the author of two well-respected books on signal
processing and did some of the original work in the '60s to use computers
to analyze and code speech.  This week he'll be talking about this early
work.

He will be bringing tapes!  This will be an excellent chance to actually
hear this early work!

        Who:    Ben Gold
        What:   Early Voice Coding and Synthesis
        When:   Thursday, March 16 at 11AM
        Where:  CCRMA Library, Top floor of the Knoll at Stanford.

Next week, Sid Feels will be discussing his work to build a hand-controlled
synthesizer.  See you at CCRMA for a couple of wonderful talks about voice!

-- Malcolm


In the World's Fair of 1939 in New York City, one of the exhibits
 by Bell Labs. was the Voder (Voice Operated Demonstrator). The Voder was a
 speech synthesizer consisting of 10 bandpass filter outputs that were summed
 to produce speech. The filters were actuated through an operator-controlled
 keyboard to produce most of the voiced sounds; there was also a pitch pedal
 and some switches to generate transient sounds.Many speech synthesizers have
 appeared since then but until recently the Voder was unique in integrating
 intensive operator training with the synthesis technology. Next week Sid Fels
 will describe his synthesizer which also requires operator training and this
 talk may be a good introduction to his very recent work.