Harvard Sentences

[BondAudio]

http://gizmodo.com/the-harvard-sente...ent-1689793568

[necjamc]

That was an interesting read. Thanks!

[JCBigler]

What? No "check one-two" "hey hey, hey hey" ?

[DonaldM]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. As it happens, my Masters degree is in Clinical Audiology, and I worked in that field for a few years, testing hearing, fitting hearing aids, that sort of thing. It was all about speech discrimination. In Grad school, we used the Harvard sentences among other tools in hearing tests of various sorts. At the time, the main goal of hearing enhancement through hearing aids was the ability to understand speech.

Even with today's digital technology with cochlear implants, that is the main focus. Unfortunately, that leaves a broad range of frequencies out of the picture, so listening to music, for example, can be a very frustrating experience. But the enhancement of understanding speech lives on, thanks to a lot of the early pioneer research in places like the HPAL.

I had the privilege of studying with Dr. John W. Black, who most consider to be the Father of Speech Science. Indeed, Speech Science became an academic discipline largely because of him. He graciously agreed to serve as one of the advisers for my Masters thesis. I recall many discussions, readings and papers on the very topic of speech discrimination and reading about the work at HPAL. Black himself was a researcher with the US military in communications. Many of the standardized phrases the military uses (ie "roger wilco") came about largely from Black's research on intelligibility of speech across electronic communications systems.

Its a fascinating area of study to be sure.

[jryser]

Wow. I loved this article.

[mesaone]

Originally Posted by DonaldM

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. As it happens, my Masters degree is in Clinical Audiology

That's really interesting, does your knowledge of clinical audiology inform your production and/or purchases? I'd imagine you at least have an edge when it comes to picking IEMs and headphones...

[joachim]

Originally Posted by DonaldM

Many of the standardized phrases the military uses (ie "roger wilco") came about largely from Black's research on intelligibility of speech across electronic communications systems.

Very interesting.
I guess, that is why in the Air Force the official way is to say "affirm" on radio and not "affirmative", because when hearing only "....tive" it could be interpreted as "negative" (a possible lethal mistake).

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by mesaone

That's really interesting, does your knowledge of clinical audiology inform your production and/or purchases? I'd imagine you at least have an edge when it comes to picking IEMs and headphones...

Oh yes, of course it does. I used to run frequency and formant analysis all the time on different hearing aids of the time. If someone brought in a hearing aid for repair, the first thing we'd do is run a freq analysis to and compare to the specs to see if anything had changed. So, yes, all that comes into play when I look at a spectral analysis plugin on a mix or using a multiband filter like Blue Cat MB7. Doesn't mean I'm an ace audio engineer, though. There's the science and then there's the art!

[Bob Olhsson]

In 1965 I took a class in music psychology that has been very useful. It was taught entirely from free Bell Labs publications because there were no books available that weren't 90% BS. Audio is not exactly a well researched science outside of communications.

[Drew Mazurek]

Originally Posted by Bob Olhsson

...Bell Labs....

Hear hear Bob!!

From the dB itself to the transistor, the audio world (world in general for that matter) owes a lot to the people of Bell Labs.