---
created_at: '2015-08-20T17:19:53.000Z'
title: An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech (2007)
url: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave-speech/
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**An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech  
**Matt Davis

_MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit  
Chaucer Road  
Cambridge CB2 7EF._

### 1) Introduction:

Sine-wave speech is a form of artificially degraded speech first developed at [Haskins Laboratory][91]. Several seminal experiments on the perception of sine-wave speech are described here:

Remez, R.E., Rubin, P.E., Pisoni, D.B., Carrell, T.D. (1981) Speech perception without traditional speech cues. _Science,_ 212, 947-9. [PubMed][92]

In this work, Remez and colleagues demonstrated a dramatic change in the way in which sine-wave speech sentences are perceived, depending on listener's specific prior knowledge. For instance, listen to this sound:

![SWS][93]

Most naive listeners hear this as a set of simultaneous whistles, or science fiction sounds. However, for listeners that have previously heard this sound:

![SWS][93]

Listening to the sine-wave speech sound again produces a very different percept of a fully intelligible spoken sentence. This dramatic change in perception is an example of "perceptual insight" or pop-out. We have argued that this form of pop-out is an example of a top-down perceptual process produced by higher-level knowledge and expectations concerning sounds that can potentially be heard as speech:

Davis, M.H., Johnsrude, I.S. (2007) "Hearing speech sounds: Top-down influences on the interface between audition and speech perception." _Hearing Research,_ 229(1-2), 132-147. [PDF][94].

There are four more example pairs of sine-wave and clear speech in the table below:

| ----- |
| 

**Sine-Wave Speech**

 | 

**Clear Speech**

 |  
| 

![SWS][93]

 | 

![SWS][93]

 |  
| 

![SWS][93]

 | 

![SWS][93]

 |  
| 

![SWS][93]

 | 

![SWS][93]

 |  
| 

![SWS][93]

 | 

![SWS][93]

 | 

As you listen to these four examples, you may find that you get better at understanding the sine-wave speech first time around. This is an example of perceptual learning. Having heard several examples of sine-wave speech, your perceptual system has tuned into this form of distortion, so as to be able to perceive new sine-wave speech sentences more clearly.

To my knowledge, no one has done controlled experiments to demonstrate that pop-out helps with learning sine-wave speech. However, for another form of distortion (noise-vocoded speech), we have shown that pop-out enhances perceptual learning so that people more rapidly learn to understand new distorted sentences. These experiments with [vocoded speech][95] suggest that perceptual learning is also a top-down process:

Davis, M.H., Johnsrude, I.S., Hervais-Adelman, A., Taylor, K. & McGettigan, C.M. (2005) Lexical information drives perceptual learning of distorted speech: Evidence from the comprehension of noise-vocoded sentences. _Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134_(2), 222-241. [PDF][96].

### 2) Generating Sine-Wave Speech:

Sine-wave speech is generated by using a formant tracker to detect the formant frequencies found in an utterance, and then synthesising sine waves that track the centre of these formants. This is illustrated in the figures below:

![Stages _fcksavedurl=figure.jpg alt=][97]

A number of pieces of software exist for generating sine-wave versions of utterances. These sentences shown above were generated using [Praat software][98] and a [script][99] written by [Chris Darwin.][99] There's also [Matlab][100] code to [generate sine-wave speech][101] written by [Dan Ellis][102].

### 3) Other forms of perceptual insight:

There are a number of examples of perceptual insight in the visual domain that have been documented. For instance, turning grey-scale images into high contrast, black/white images can produce a similar phenomenon to sine-wave speech. This manipulation was originally described by Craig Mooney (1957).

![Mooney Figure][103]

Click on the image to receive a visual hint about the content of this image. This form of visual perceptual insight is discussed in greater detail by [Nava Rubin][104] in this paper:

Rubin, N., Nakayama, K. and Shapley, R. (2002), The role of insight in perceptual learning: evidence from illusory contour perception. In: _Perceptual Learning,_ Fahle, M. and Poggio, T. (Eds.), MIT Press.

Which is where the example image above comes from. I'd be keen to hear of forms of perceptual insight, in other sensory modalities.

### 4) Media reports of this work:

[New Scientist][105], [Mind Hacks][106], [Boing Boing][107]

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_This page was last updated on 24th November 2007. Comments and suggestions to matt.davis@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk._

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