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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Would be a fun experiment to use something like 3 or even 1 sine to get unintelligible speech, but then pair it with subtitles where each syllable of the text is animated synchronized with the speech. (Like the "follow the bouncing ball" song lyric animations.)

By pairing the audio with the text, you would almost certainly convince the listener that they can understand it.

Edit: typo

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;-)

Sine-Wave Speech Demonstration https://youtu.be/EWzt1bI8AZ0?t=74

> Sine-wave speech is an intelligible synthetic acoustic signal composed of three or four time-varying sinusoids. Together, these few sinusoids replicate the estimated frequency and amplitude pattern of the resonance peaks of a natural utterance (Remez et al., 1981). The intelligibility of sine-wave speech, stripped of the acoustic constituents of natural speech, cannot depend on simple recognition of familiar momentary acoustic correlates of phonemes. In consequence, proof of the intelligibility of such signals refutes many descriptions of speech perception that feature canonical acoustic cues to phonemes. The perception of the linguistic properties of sine-wave speech is said to depend instead on sensitivity to acoustic modulation independent of the elements composing the signal and their specific auditory effects.

~ http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Sine-wave_speech

To anyone who listens to this, I recommend rewinding to the segment starting at 1:23 a few times and not letting it reach the spoilers. After a few rounds, my brain adjusted to the distortion and I could make it out perfectly, without ever hearing the original.

Wow this is amazing, after listening to this a couple of times the voice became super clear

Or what if you scrunched the audio down to a bandwidth beyond what was still intelligible, but still captured some semblance of the speaker's voice. Use the original audio to compute subtitles and store them alongside the audio. That's your file.

Then the player uses both as inputs to ai (some hand waving), which now has enough to put the pieces together and produce something intelligible again, in the speaker's voice.

Basically turn the speaker’s voice into a “font”, and then render text with it. Pretty sure it’s been done. Large initial delay while you get the whole font download, then basically just the text to be rendered and the occasional hint to the renderer

Without the "intelligible" part, this makes me think of what the game Celeste does to give its characters voices without voice acting.

They make voice-like synth sounds, different for each character, that are about the length of the text they're saying. It adds prosody and intonation to the text-based dialogue of the game.

https://youtu.be/TZpQH8kSWNU?t=2m50s

This is how I imagine an intelligent car would sound if it figured out how to produce speech through the antigravity engine.

Edit: oh sweet there's intonation too. Were these all made manually?

My guess is they're mostly procedurally generated with manual tweaks for particularly significant lines.

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