|
Abstract : |
We propose a new approach to nonuniform time compression, called Mach1, designed to mimic the natural timing of fast speech. At identical overall compression rates, listener comprehension for Mach1-compressed speech increased between 5 and 31 percentage points over that for linearly compressed speech, and response times dropped by 15%. For rates between 2.5 and 4.2 times real time, there was no significant comprehension loss with increasing Mach1 compression rates. In A?B preference tests, Mach1-compressed speech was chosen 95 % of the time. This paper describes the Mach1 technique and our listener-test results. Audio examples can be found on, |
