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The Speech Chain: The Physics and Biology of Spoken Language
Explains the basic mechanisms involved in spoken communication, merging the field of speech pathology, communications, psychology, engineering, and computer science.
- GenresNonfictionScience
246 pages, Paperback
First published January 2, 1973
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
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September 6, 2024Very interesting stuff explained in a simple way.
My favorite part of this book: "Consider the roomful of electronic equipment that makes up a modern, high-speed digital computer. .... Imagine the room, and everything in it, shrunk to about the size of a cigarette package."
They were onto something.
My favorite part of this book: "Consider the roomful of electronic equipment that makes up a modern, high-speed digital computer. .... Imagine the room, and everything in it, shrunk to about the size of a cigarette package."
They were onto something.
December 11, 2019
The desire to know how things work is pretty deeply ingrained in most of us. Even better and somehow more satisfying is watching how something functions in action (there's a reason that old "Mouse Trap" game was so popular back when I was a young man).
"The Speech Chain" delivers broadly on its promise to take the reader from "farm to table" so to speak, in the process of how things go from being thoughts to sentences uttered, that are then received by someone else working with the same equipment as the speaker (for the most part; some of us have accents, hearing problems, etc).
This is all good, as is the "theoretical" stuff that comes later in the book, in which the authors talk about potential applications for this technology when the practical tools are developed. I put "theoretical" in quotes because a lot of this stuff that was speculative at the time is now taken for granted, i.e. text-to-speech programs and vice-versa. Naturally, then, it would be churlish to fault a book for being dated in its outlook, since it's an unavoidable byproduct of writing anything (unless you have a Delorean with a Time-Flux Capacitor). Also, the futurism of the past, whether errant or on target, is kind of charming.
My problem is that so much of the book is written for high-school students. I didn't know that, until I'd already lain hands on the book, though, and for every interesting facet or detail explored by the authors, there are two or three instances in which proceedings are ground to a halt to explicate something very basic. Even as a layman, I found this frustrating and a poor use of time (in a book that's only a couple hundred pages long, one can't afford to recapitulate something even a stoner watching Bill Nye reruns probably already knows).
That said, the book still has its utility, and aforementioned charms. Recommended for young and intellectually precocious students who want to know more about how a thought becomes a sound becomes a sentence. The rest of the speech pattern (how the thought "becomes") is still something with which we're struggling. Maybe thirty years from now our own speculative and cutting-edge works will look pretty quaint? Bet on it. Anyway, tepid recommendation.
"The Speech Chain" delivers broadly on its promise to take the reader from "farm to table" so to speak, in the process of how things go from being thoughts to sentences uttered, that are then received by someone else working with the same equipment as the speaker (for the most part; some of us have accents, hearing problems, etc).
This is all good, as is the "theoretical" stuff that comes later in the book, in which the authors talk about potential applications for this technology when the practical tools are developed. I put "theoretical" in quotes because a lot of this stuff that was speculative at the time is now taken for granted, i.e. text-to-speech programs and vice-versa. Naturally, then, it would be churlish to fault a book for being dated in its outlook, since it's an unavoidable byproduct of writing anything (unless you have a Delorean with a Time-Flux Capacitor). Also, the futurism of the past, whether errant or on target, is kind of charming.
My problem is that so much of the book is written for high-school students. I didn't know that, until I'd already lain hands on the book, though, and for every interesting facet or detail explored by the authors, there are two or three instances in which proceedings are ground to a halt to explicate something very basic. Even as a layman, I found this frustrating and a poor use of time (in a book that's only a couple hundred pages long, one can't afford to recapitulate something even a stoner watching Bill Nye reruns probably already knows).
That said, the book still has its utility, and aforementioned charms. Recommended for young and intellectually precocious students who want to know more about how a thought becomes a sound becomes a sentence. The rest of the speech pattern (how the thought "becomes") is still something with which we're struggling. Maybe thirty years from now our own speculative and cutting-edge works will look pretty quaint? Bet on it. Anyway, tepid recommendation.
February 22, 2008
Pretty basic physics of speech book. Easy to read and understand.
April 30, 2016
Fascinating
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews