Re: Non-phonological stimuli

[Tony Miller <antonio.miller@xxxxxxxxx>]

Livia-

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has published a recommendation for Artificial Voice which "is a signal that is mathematically defined and that reproduces the time and spectral characteristics of speech", yet contains no phonetic information.  

You can download the recommendation (free for a limited time) in PDF format at:  http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-P.50/en

The appendix of the recommendation includes a speech database CD which contains male and female nonsense speech samples.  Listening to them is quite odd, but seriously useful if you are concerned with getting your signals through a voice activity detector or speech vocoder.

I hope this helps.  Let me know if you have any questions.

--
Tony Miller
Motorola Acoustic Technology Center
8000 West Sunrise Blvd, Mail Stop 22-7-F
Plantation, FL 33322-4104
Cell: (954) 605-7982 | Desk: (954) 723-3989
email: antonio.miller@xxxxxxxxxxxx

Dear List,

I am doing a project involving phonological processing using auditory
words and pseudowords.  I am trying to find a good non-phonological
control stimulus that does not contain recognizable phonemes, but
still has similar characteristics and complexity to speech.  An ideal
solution would be some kind of filtering or distortion that I could
apply to my existing word stimuli so that each word is matched with
its own control, but I would be open to independently generated
stimuli as well.  I have tried playing the words backwards, and have
experimented a little with band pass filtering, but the results still
end up sounding too "phonological."  Does anyone know of better
options?  Since we're doing a matching task, each control stimulus
would also have to be unique sounding enough for our subjects to
discriminate.

Thank you in advance,

Livia King