Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Sine Wave Speech

Ever heard of Sine Wave Speech? It's where they take a clip of speech and distort it into a weird mess of mechanical squeaks.
Here's the strange part:
The distorted version doesn't sound like speech at all...
...until you hear the undistorted version. Then you can make out the words in the garbled sentence. It's weird!
Click "Play Garble" to hear the garbled sentence (you may need to boost the volume). Then click "Play Nice" to hear the ungarbled version. Then replay the Garble version to hear what you didn't hear before...




More examples (including the one I used) here.

p.s. I'm still working on my cartoon, this was just a quick diversion.
p.p.s. Yes, I know the "sound waves" on the screens aren't sine waves.

5 comments:

Linda Davick said...

Interesting! (and hilarious.)

outsidetheberm said...

Very cool indeed. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

wow! fun

Namowal (Jennifer Bourne) said...

Hi Linda, outsidetheberm and stray,
Glad you liked this.
Funny how the ambiguous becomes the obvious with a little hint.
I wonder what would happen if I heard a misleading hint like "Nan's baking a pie." Would I hear that in the sine wave version?

booda baby said...

That's really REALLY cool. I like that you illustrated it because you could have told me and I'd have nodded along, but this was WAY cooler.