- What made real-time continuous speech recognition, which Raj Reddy pioneered at Carnegie Mellon, so difficult in the 1970s and 1980s?
Acoustics and Sound
The physics and perception of sound.
- What does the acronym FRT stand for in the herring bubble-sound research?
- Which frequency range turned out to be responsible for making fingernails-on-a-blackboard sound so unbearable?
- How did researchers isolate which parts of the sound caused the strongest discomfort?
- What evolutionary explanation did the team propose for why this sound is so aversive?
- Why does dry spaghetti almost always break into more than two pieces?
- What role does the flexural wave released at the first break play in causing further fractures?
- What is delayed auditory feedback, and why does it make a speaker stutter or fall silent?
- How did the SpeechJammer device use delayed auditory feedback to interrupt someone talking at a distance?
- What delay interval between speech and its playback is disruptive enough to silence a speaker?
- Why does sound played through the mother's abdomen reach a fetus only weakly?
- Why does playing the didgeridoo strengthen the same muscles responsible for airway collapse during sleep apnoea?
- What is misophonia, and what sounds most commonly trigger it?
- What happened when researchers subjected a live earthworm to acoustic vibration at increasing frequencies?
- Why did the earthworm's resonant patterns match what acoustic theory predicts for a soft elastic cylinder?
- Why does breathing helium raise the resonant frequency of vocal cavities, producing the cartoon-voice effect?
- What question about animal vocalisation were researchers testing by putting a Chinese alligator in a helium-air mixture?
- How did the alligator's bellow change under helium, and what did that confirm about resonance theory?
- How precise is bat echolocation normally, and what can it detect at a distance?