Subject: Re: speech/music From: Sue Johnson <sej28(at)ENG.CAM.AC.UK> Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:17:46 +0100Dan/List > Houtgast & Steeneken). Rather, I think a lot of our uncanny ability to > pick out speech from the most bizarrely-distorted signals comes from the > very highly sophisticated speech-pattern decoders we have, which employ all > of the many levels of constraints applicable to speech percepts (from > low-level pitch continuity through to high level semantic prior > likelihoods) to create and develop plausible speech hypotheses that can > account for portions of the perceived auditory scene. > I have problems with this. (sorry) I'm sure you must be able to detect the presence of speech independent of being able to recognise it. If someone spoke to me in Finnish say, I would be able to tell they were speaking (even in the presence of background music/noise), even though I couldn't even segment the words, never mind syntactically or semantically parse them. I think there must be some way the brain splits up (deconvolves) the signal before applying a speech recogniser. (I have no proof of this of course, it's just a gut feeling) I agree having a recogniser which would cope with speech would be the ideal solution, but there is problems of training appropriate models to recognise music you haven't seen before (the current HMM methods assume the training data represents in some way the same distribution as the test data), and from a time constraint, any removal of audio without relevant information content before recognition is helpful. I dont have the slightest idea of how the brain detects speech, but it would seem logical to me that it can do that on a very low-level acoustic basis. If this were true then in theory a front-end speech detector should be possible. I admit I know very little on this subject, so am looking forward to people correcting me. thanks for all your comments. Sue