Now You're Talking

July 30, 2018
British acoustic engineer Cox (The Sound Book) channels his enthusiasm about the wonders of sound and the possibilities of artificial intelligence into a slow-building essay collection. “Being able to speak is what makes us human,” Cox writes, before excitedly moving through a miscellany of topics related to the evolutionary development of hearing, innovations in amplifying and recording technology, and evolutionary and cultural responses to accents and other distinguishing features of human speech. The chapter “My Voice Is Me” looks at social factors behind speech characteristics, such as the registers women speak in and speech patterns related to sexual identity. Cox is at his best when discussing where speech and technology overlap, as with his examination of how talking robots capture incidental data from tone-of-voice commands in order to more effectively mimic human speech. The final chapter, one of the book’s finest, deals with computer programs that can construct and recite love poems. Cox proves an affable guide, and his sharp history will give casual science buffs a lot to talk about.

August 1, 2018
A lucid look at the science behind human communication.Consider a smartly constructed computer that read every book in the world. Even if it did, writes Cox (Acoustic Engineering/Univ. of Salford; The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World, 2014), "its knowledge would be incomplete," for the computer would lack a world of cultural context. It would probably not be able to understand most allusions, would certainly not be able to fill in the blanks of the things that human storytellers leave out of their tales, might not parse plays on words, and so forth. That we human speakers and listeners are able to do all these things points to the phenomenal amount of brainpower that underlies communication. The author examines the evolution of the human vocal tract, noting that standing upright lengthened it to produce a great variety of sounds--and adding that there are distinct differences in the pronunciation of short and tall people in pronouncing words such as bit/bet because of vocal tract length, differences that we adjust for without knowing that we're doing so: "the listener subconsciously estimates how long the vocal tract of the speaker is." Just so, speech impediments such as hesitation or stuttering speak to a huge amount of neural processing and misprocessing as well as the implication of genetics, such as the mutation of "FOXP2 on chromosome 7," in making pronunciation difficult for one unfortunate British family. Neural processing, too, makes it possible for us to judge the "authenticity" of a speaker who is reporting some emotion--an authenticity that is too often faked, whether by a politician or a skilled actor. The greatest takeaway from the book is the welcome thought that our best moments as human communicators are in ordinary conversations, "quotidian activity that allows knowledge about how to survive and thrive to be passed between us."There's lots to ponder in Cox's geekily entertaining exploration of how we acquire our voices and understand those of others.

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