Lately I have received several promotions for software designed to take a text file and convert it into natural speech. The idea is one can produce narration or other oral information without hiring a professional narrator. Although I will get to certain issues related to text to speech, it will be useful to begin with…
DISTORTION
The word “distortion” is defined in the Merriam Webster dictionary as “the act of twisting or altering something out of its true, natural, or original state.” In this post I want to discuss distortion in the context of audio. It is sometimes a bad thing and sometimes can be used creatively. Passing an audio signal…
PAPERS-1: Simultaneity and Polyphony in Speech Based Audio Art
As I looked through older published papers of mine I realized that several went into depth on topics that I have only touched upon, if at all, in my recent blog posts. Most of these were done for scholarly conferences (and reflect a scholarly writing style required of this kind of work) and were peer…
TALK RADIO
This post is not about the content of talk radio programs, but about the sound of talkers on talk radio, especially those not in the studio where the program originates. This will not be an extremely complex technical article (I hope) though some technical material needs to be presented in a simplified (perhaps over-simplified) way. If…
PODCAST 1: STORIES IN SOUND
In this post I want to talk about a huge growth area in the field of audio: podcasts. This is a huge topic so I will start with what will ultimately become a series of articles. Podcasts can, in a sense, be considered a new kind of radio. Before the introduction of television people would…