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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

MOTIVATION

The motivation for creating a prosodic font comes from a number of current disciplinarytrends: the too narrowly focused research in speech recognition, design for

computational environments, and a growing need for richer and transformationalcommunication mediums in the increasingly casual Internet traffic.

Some designers today have embraced computer technology and code as the very mediumthey work with, like paints and canvas. Computers allow the exploration of forms andmediums that have heretofore not existed. I consider prosodic font work to contribute tothis exploratory design. I ask, “How can the letters of the English alphabet be

represented, differentiated and animated? When the exchange of text occurs through acomputer interface rather than a non-electronic paper interface, how can the nature offont representation change? What additional information can a font convey when thefont represents a speaking voice rather than a hand-manipulated pen?”

Trends in speech recognition and synthesis have been narrowly focused upon

recognizing semantic word units only. The influence of prosody upon the interpretationof semantics and speaker intention has been neglected. Furthermore, research in prosodyrecognition proceeds largely outside of and separate from speech recognition researchefforts. Commercially available speech recognition packages do not even consider thatthird party developers might be interested in something aside from semantic content.IBM’s Via Voice and DragonSpeak’s Naturally Speaking do not include external codelibraries to permit third party developers to further process the raw speech signals. Speech recognition is largely a black-boxed procedure. Although this state of affairs is atestament to the difficulty of prosody recognition and interpretation, this may also beattributed to the fact that there are few compelling applications that use prosody andvocal expression in conjunction with semantic speech recognition. Prosodic Font canbegin to demonstrate the commercial viability of corporate prosody and speechrecognition, widening the scope of what qualifies currently as speech recognition.Prosodic Font contributes to the field of speech generation by developing discretetextual descriptions of emotionally charged segments of speech. This work points toprosodic features of interest, and how one might describe them in text.

Prosodic Font could also be useful to researchers in prosody and speech as a tool to helprecognize and identify prosodic and voice quality variation. Currently researchers learnhow to read prosodic variation from sequences of numbers and spectrograms of speechdata. Prosodic Font could be visual, temporal tool to help researchers identify the

success or failure of the algorithms they develop to extract prosody and affective featuresfrom speech.

Prosodic fonts are becoming a social need. Writing has seldom been used as acommunication medium in environments in which people are spatially co-located,

sometimes even in neighboring offices. The influence of electronic mail has made writinga tool of everyday management, conversation, and even romantic courting. Yet, writingemail is done differently than writing on paper has been done (Ferrara, Brunner, andWhittemore, 1991). The email register (i.e. “tone of voice”) is decidedly more informal,

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

even shorthand-ish, than writing that is used in other written contexts. This informalregister, added to the lack of richness and the level of spontaneity that the email mediumallows, has led to many terrible misunderstandings between people where the writer’sintent has been judged to be much different than that which the writer intended. In face-to-face conversation, prosody is central among human communication tools for

conveying psychological-emotional state, intentions, and the point of information focus.When writing provides little context for the hapless reader, such as in email, there is aneed for speaker’s intention and emotional state cues to be provided along with thesemantics of the message.

In the world of portable technology, there is a need for seamless translation betweenmediums such as voice and text, depending upon the sender’s and recipient’s currentsocial needs. A prosodic font provides such an interface that does not compromise anaudio message to the extent that semantic speech recognition would. Further, a prosodicfont’s design potential for emerging through time might be easily adapted to very smalldisplays. For example, imagine you are ensconced within a formal situation that shouldnot be interrupted, such as an important business meeting. You receive notice throughone of your portables that someone important to you has sent you a message. You wantto hear it, but you don’t want to risk interrupting the meeting, nor do you want othersaround you to hear your message. You select “visual” output. The message plays in aprosodic font, reflecting the sender’s tone of voice, rhythm, loudness, and forcefulness inthe systematic movement of the syllables over time. You can see in the words how thesender expresses emotion vocally, and you understand more deeply what she meant toconvey to you by seeing how the words change relative to each other. In this way,

translation from audio to text may occur without losing speech information. The writtenmessage is individual, context …… 此处隐藏：6189字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……