Legacy: Pattern Playback
The Pattern Playback is an early talking machine that was built by Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories in the late 1940s.
The construction and use of the Playback permitted a systematic study of the interactions between the individual sounds of speech. In turn, this led to pioneering work in the 1950s by Franklin S. Cooper, Pierre C. Delattre, Alvin M. Liberman, John M. Borst, Louis J. Gerstman, Katherine Safford Harris, and many others on determining the underlying critical “cues” for speech perception. This research had a revolutionary effect on speech science, and was fundamental to the development of modern techniques of speech synthesis, the development of reading machines for the blind, and the study of speech perception and recognition. The Pattern Playback was last used in an experimental study by Robert Remez, in 1976. It was eventually superseded by digital speech analysis/synthesis approaches, such as Philip Rubin’s HADES system and the Arai Laboratory’s Digital Pattern Playback, among others.
The original Pattern Playback now resides in the museum at the Haskins Laboratories Museum, 300 George Street, Suite 900, in New Haven, Connecticut.
This is a legacy demo intended to capture a bit of this history and provide a brief, virtual tour of the Pattern Playback.
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Listen to and ‘view’ selected sentences
Operating principles of the Pattern Playback
See The Adventure Film CBS television segment from 1954
Download all audio files as a Zip in: MP3 format or WAV format.