Accepted by_________________________________________________(2)

Glorianna Davenport and Justine Cassell welcomed me into their respective researchgroups at various points and gave me the benefits of their creative and scientificperspectives. John Maeda taught me the conceptual and technical tools in his newcourse, Typography, that enabled me to write Prosodic Font.

My love and appreciation to Mom and Dad, for continuously putting my life into

perspective during the most difficult and busiest of times. Your gifts to me are more thanI can ever realize.

And to Samarjit, who transformed my thesis experience and my life, my love.

the Space between the Spoken and the Written tara michelle graber rosenberger The advent of automated speech recognition opens up new possibilities for design of new typographic forms. Graphic designers have long been designing text to evoke the sound of a

INTRODUCTION

When most words are written, they become, of course, a part of the visual world. Like most of theelements of the visual world, they become static things and lose, as such, the dynamism which is socharacteristic of the auditory world in general, and of the spoken word in particular. They lose much ofthe personal element...They lose those emotional overtones and emphases...Thus, in general, words, bybecoming visible, join a world of relative indifference to the viewer – a word from which the magic ‘power’of the word has been abstracted.

Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), quoting J.C. Carothers, writing inPsychiatry, November 1959.

Compared to the richness of speech, writing is a meager system. A speaker uses stress, pitch, rate, pauses,voice qualities, and a host of other sound patterns not even vaguely defined to communicate a message aswell as attitudes and feelings about what he is saying. Writing can barely achieve such a repertoire.Gibson and Levin, from the Psychology of Reading (1975).

This thesis is about writing. Or rather, what writing might become when one is writingby speaking. What does the introduction of software that can translate speech intowritten symbols do to the nature of writing, of reading? Does the message itself, thewritten object, change in appearance from what we now know, and from what it appearsto be at first glance? Does it encode just the words that we write now by hand? Or doesit also encode the emotional overtones, the lyric melody, the subtle rhythms of ourspeech into the written symbology? What, then, does typography become?

Figure 1: A system overview of a prosodic font system. A speech recognizer paired with prosody recognizerfeeds descriptions of the voice signal and words uttered into a Prosodic Font. A Prosodic Font is an abstractdescription of letter forms with algorithms for motion. It uses a descriptive vocal model of the particularspeaker, developed over time. A speaker might also make certain aesthetic decisions, such as basic fontshapes and colors, about prosodic font appearance through a graphic user interface.

Prosodic typography uses the active recognition of speech and prosody – the song andrhythm of ordinary talk – in the design of a font. Further, the temporal and dynamiccharacteristics of speech are to some extent transferred to font representation, lendingwritten representations some of talk’s transitory, dynamic qualities. A prosodic font is

the Space between the Spoken and the Written tara michelle graber rosenberger The advent of automated speech recognition opens up new possibilities for design of new typographic forms. Graphic designers have long been designing text to evoke the sound of a

designed for motion, not static print. Prosodic typography is the electronic interventionbetween speech and text. It represents the contextual, individual aspects of speech thatprinted typography does not capture.

Prosodic Font is a project that explores what becomes possible when speech recognitionmerges with dynamic forms of typography. Already, writing is no longer a kinestheticexercise, but a vocal one. Next, speech recognition will recognize not just the word itselfbut how the word was said, and how long it lasted, and how quickly the next wordfollowed. Even vocal events like inhaling and exhaling, sounds which are particularlyexplosive, and speech errors like words left only half-begun can have visual correlates.These prosodic characteristics can be mapped onto the structural architecture of a

letterform, called a glyph. In this dynamic context, word presentation adopts some of thetemporal quality of speech, adopting a temporal word by word presentation rather thanhaving them appear as beads on a visual string.

Text has long been considered one of the least rich mediums of communication, face toface conversation the richest because it involves speech, facial expression, gesture andtemporal forms (Daft and Lengel, 1987). Non-rich forms of communication admit

greater ambiguity into the cycle of interpretation between people; hence, richer forms ofcommunication are the preferred modes of interaction in highly volatile business

communications, as well as intimate personal relationships, where subtle innuendoes areread deeply by participants. By introducing prosodic expression indications into textualwritten form, text as a medium may develop greater communicative richness. A prosodicfont would be situated in the continuum of rich mediums between telephony (voicealone) and textual communication as we currently understand it.

Speech is a medium of emotional communication as well as a medium of semanticcommunication. After the face, vocal inflection is the second-most modality expressiveof emotion we possess (Picard, 1997). Research into emotion and speech has found thatpeople can recognize affect with 60% reliability when context and meaning are obscured(Scherer, 1981). Humans can distinguish arousal in the voice (angry versus sad) butfrequently confuse valence ( angry ve …… 此处隐藏：6078字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……