Joline Blais
Visitor
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Code & Infant speech - 2006/05/11 07:50
"I would like to talk more in depth about the relationship between code and human language, and from that to oral expression." -Jospehine Bosma
Josephine, I was delighted to see you open up the topic of voice & code.
I have been thinking about that since Dec of 2000, when I watched my 6 month old daughter 's babble appear as text on my computer screen. I had been nursing her as I was composing a document usign voice-to-text software. Unexpectedly and abruptly, my daughter stopped nursing and blurted out a full string of babble. I watched as her words were picked up by the microphone, sending a visual signal to the control panel, then her 'words' appeared IN ENGLISH on the computer screen.
Her first composition, a short paragraph, contained 2 proper names: that of my current boss: Harold, and also Haliburton.
Intrigued, I trid the experiment again.
Here is what the software 'heard' my daughter say in the weeks of dec 2000 when the nation stood on the brink of electoral crisis:
Ruled late
clear plan
hah hah hah hah
Holocaust
and how
an brouhaha
could haul Halliburton
lot
collarless
all cat
who collarless
Lula Clara alluded
< hah
Hakka
Clinton was
the 8th month ahead
I've been working on different ways to translate and analyze these findings, and also recalling my experience years ago, typing in "childcare" in the MSWord thesaurus and getting the term "kidnapper" as a response. Clearly there are intentional and unintentional biases build into software at many levels, but I'm interested in investigating the relationship between very early human speech--and it's connection by french feminist like Kristeva with the pre-Oedipal Chora"--to the ways that my rpogram code translatesd sound/voice to speech.
What I'd really like to do is look at the software code itself and see how "training" the voice-to-text influences how it translates sounds, babble, words. I've been experimenting with different trainig modules & I will also be trying to translate "natural" sounds to see what the software picks up.
I'd be interested to learn more about other projects that might be related to this, or in other research that may be linked. Perhaps you'd have some suggestions, Josephine, or Inke?
--joline
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