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-- forwarded article --
Now Hear This, Quickly
By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER
"WE call it the 66-second minute," Laura Gaines said.
Ms. Gaines is the vice president of Prime Image, a maker of devices
like the Digital Time Machine that shorten audio and video recordings
by up to 12 percent with "no discernible results." Micro-editing, as
the process is called, created a stir last year when some broadcasters
were reported to be using the technology to squeeze more
advertisements into the same block of time.
As it turns out, it was hardly an isolated phenomenon. Creating more
time is the impetus behind many new technologies that allow listeners
to pick up the pace.
From call centers and intelligence agencies to radio stations and
universities, such technology helps listeners try to keep up with the
growing number of audio recordings piling up on the air, on the phone
and on the Web. Wading though this mountain of words faster than it
takes to say them not only saves companies money; it might help people
absorb more knowledge.
The new software programs, DVD players and phone services rising to
this challenge all take advantage of the human ability to comprehend
speech much more quickly than the typical spoken rate of 140 to 180
words a minute. How many times as fast? "I've heard of instances where
people go to 4X, and they still want it to go faster," said Blake
Erickson of Telex Communications, which makes "talking book" audio
players for the educational market.
Scientists have long known that people can understand speech at a rate
of up to 400 words a minute and beyond. "Speech rate isn't limited by
the listener," said Arthur Wingfield, a psychology professor at
Brandeis University. "It's limited by the speaker."
In normal conversation, only a small part of the brain is taxed,
leaving excess processing power to be used for listening for lurking
predators, filtering out background noise or simply daydreaming.
But speeding up speech on analog equipment like cassette decks
traditionally led to the dreaded chipmunk effect, making long-term
listening untenable. Digital time compression, however, works by
discarding tiny segments of repetitive audio (for example, 30
milliseconds of a vowel) and reconnecting the remaining bits, leaving
the pitch unaltered.
Simple versions of digital time compression have been available for
years in devices like answering machines and hand-held recorders but
did not offer much in terms of user control. A confluence of smart
software, wider Internet access and inexpensive hardware, however, now
enables listeners to choose when to step on the gas.
Auxiliary programs, or plug-ins, that allow digital audio and video
recordings to be played faster (or slowed down) at will have recently
become available for popular software like RealOne and Windows Media
Player. Perhaps the most popular is Enounce's 2XAV plug-in (which
works with both Real and Windows players and costs $29.95); the latest
version of Windows Media Player offers a proprietary version of this
feature. Similar capabilities are finding their way into other
hardware - for example, the latest DVD recorders from Panasonic.
"You can watch a two-hour movie on a one-hour flight," said Chris
Binace, an Enounce software developer. Yet this kind of software is
not generally intended for entertainment listening. So far most
end-user applications have involved academia, for example, allowing
students to listen to archived audio or video lectures.
Online, the amount of recorded audio is growing at an overwhelming
rate, providing a new impetus for speed listening. A spokeswoman for
National Public Radio said that demand for NPR audio on the Web was
about 50 percent greater in June than it was a year earlier, and now
averaged 5.5 to 7 million audio downloads a month.
"You just have oodles of data,'' said Ed Rucinski, a vice president of
the Dictaphone Corporation, "and if you can only listen to it in a
real-time fashion, that's your bottleneck." Mr. Rucinski's company
records "literally millions of hours" of audio every year: medical
dictation, emergency calls to 911 centers, even financial
transactions. "Any time you call your broker," he said, "that gets
recorded."
One company addressing the deluge is Fast-Talk Communications, which
makes software for large businesses that scours voice and audio data
much the way search engines sift through text. Many Fast-Talk clients
work in intelligence. "But there's a limited number of linguists,"
said Bob Crochetiere, a Fast-Talk sales engineer, so companies have to
find ways of processing this material more efficiently. Mr.
Crochetiere said clients would often listen to audio at speeds
increased by as much as 50 percent, but only in bursts because after
too much fast listening, "they start zoning."
Hannah Hawkins, transcription manager for CCBN, a company that records
and archives hundreds of lengthy conference calls each week for the
financial industry, said, that speed was crucial. Clients need the
transcripts as soon as possible after the call is finished, so CCBN
transcribers sometimes double the playback speed of familiar portions
like introductory legal disclaimers.
"If they're speaking very slowly," Ms. Hawkins said, "you can
understand them perfectly" at accelerated speeds.
Richard Brownrigg, a general manager at [1]RealNetworks, which makes
the RealOne media player, said that fast playback was still in its
early days,but that he could imagine its value expanding as voice
technology crossed into new areas. Playing back long cellphone
messages in half the time, for example, becomes attractive "when
people don't want to chew up their minutes," Mr. Brownrigg said.
In advertising, where costly post-production of commercials can take
longer than the production itself, the potential savings are vast. "To
edit a 30-second spot can take half a day," said Ms. Gaines of Prime
Image, but takes just minutes with the company's technology. (She
hastened to point out that the compression was intended to enable
advertisers to say more in the same period of time, not to let
broadcasters shortchange the advertisers.)
Most research has indicated no loss of comprehension or
intelligibility at playback speeds of two or even three times normal
speed. Cameron Earle, who is helping to commercialize variable-speed
playback applications developed by Brigham Young University, said that
most students chose rates that were 80 to 120 percent faster than
normal with no decrease in test scores. Although it does take some
getting used to, Mr. Earle said, he estimates that "80 percent of
acclimation is in the first hour."
Perhaps even more significant, the technology may have benefits beyond
saving time and money. "People who are listening at accelerated speeds
learn just as much, and there's some evidence they may learn even a
bit more," said Kevin Harrigan, an associate professor at the Center
for Learning and Teaching Through Technology of the University of
Waterloo in Canada. The consensus is that the extra brainpower needed
to follow speedy speech enhances comprehension. "If you're listening
at accelerated speeds," said Joel Galbraith, a researcher in Penn
State's instructional systems program, "it forces you to not do
anything else, so you're more focused on it."
Ray Juang, a University of California undergraduate who would often
fall asleep in Berkeley's vast lecture halls, agrees. "On average, I
understand the material better during playback than in the actual
lecture room," Mr. Juang said. "The speed-up does force me to pay more
attention."
Accelerated speech also piques interest. A quarter-century ago,
Priscilla La Barbara, a marketing professor at New York University,
found that time-compressed radio advertisements were perceived as more
interesting and led to higher rates of recall.
But the days of those fast-talking radio announcers ("3.7 percent
A.P.R.," "void where prohibited") may be numbered: Esther Janse, a
post-doctoral researcher at the University of Utrecht, has found that
digitally accelerated speech is more intelligible than the natural
speech of a person talking rapidly. "When you try to speak faster and
faster, speech gets very blurred," Ms. Janse said. The distinctions
fade, she said, whereas digitally accelerated speech uniformly
preserves all the crucial intonations and inflections.
There are other examples of how machine-altered speech may trump that
of humans. Professor Wingfield of Brandeis said that airplane pilots
had been shown to pay greater heed to warnings issued by computerized
voices than natural human recordings. "When one of these hokey
synthesized computer voices says to pull up," he said, "it's like,
'Oh, well, that's a computer. It must know better than I do.' "
Synthesized accelerated has many other devotees. "When I listen to the
newspaper, I tend to go as high as 650" words per minute, said Gregory
Rosmaita, a Web designer based in Jersey City. Because Mr. Rosmaita is
blind, his interface with computers is audio-based, in the form of a
synthesized voice that reads text aloud. He prefers British English to
American in this regard. "With the more clipped British speech," he
said, "I can increase the rate even faster."
He said he had become so accustomed to accelerated speech that normal
rates could sound unnatural. "It's actually difficult to comprehend
the speech when it becomes that slow," he said. "It's sort of like
watching a marquee scrolling one letter at a time rather than one word
at a time."
Some users compared it to going back to dial-up Internet access after
experiencing broadband. "I cannot stand to listen at 1.0," said Mr.
Earle of Brigham Young. Mr. Galbraith of Penn State agrees. "Once you
go faster, you just can't go back to real time," he said.
There are some caveats: for example, the capacity to understand fast
speech seems to fade with age. "The younger the person is, the faster
they can go," said Mr. Earle, who said he had noticed a drop-off
around age 30. "Professors can never go as fast as the students.
Students can crank it out."
Few question that rapid playback saves time. "There's no doubt,
absolutely," said Patrick McClanahan, a Navy lieutenant commander who
used variable-speed playback while earning his master's degree in
business administration at the Wharton School. Commander McClanahan
said he most appreciated the ability to find a crucial point in a
recorded lecture. "It's virtually impossible to slide that little
thing across and find exactly what you want," he said of the cursor in
audio playback software. Variable-speed playback eliminates the need
to do so.
Mr. Juang, who as a Berkeley undergraduate has sometimes watched six
two-hour lectures a day, said that even with occasional buffering
delays and the need to replay bits that went by too fast, "an hour
takes 35 or 40 minutes at most."
So as fast listening becomes commonplace, will more people turn into
fast talkers?
"We're used to hearing things faster, so it probably translates into
our talking as well," Mr. Galbraith said. "We'll start conditioning
ourselves to just expecting and needing it faster."
Professor Wingfield of Brandeis is not so sure. "Knights were jousting
with the same brain that we're using today," he said. "The
articulatory system, the physiology of speech has not changed."
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