On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 7:14 PM, Dave Henn <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> ....
>
> I'm only going to reply to this part because it's quick. There are LOTS of
> other cues before a reader, far more than the individual words and the
> punctuation. There is the context in which each word is employed, which is
> dependent in part on the words surrounding it., partly on the words in
> larger portions of the text being processed. There is the flow of the text
> in a sentence, it's rhythm, or, as you say, cadence that should be parsable
> using phonemes and syllabic databases (I'm sure I'm mangling the
> terminology, but you get the idea). How often have you seen someone or
> yourself read a passage aloud a second time because the first time didn't
> sound right? Something cued, or didn't, your change in how you read the
> passage. All of these things are goals for text-to-speech, and context is
> already being used in many. I don't know about rhythm, but that shouldn't be
> long if it's not already there. As far as gender, if a system has a
> sufficient database of names, it should be able to take a good guess at
> that, and pitch and timbre would at least partially follow from gender.
> Tone, I don't know, but context would certainly help there.
First: Those are all things that can be inferred, but many of them are
choices. Other choices are possible. Those choices are what make a reading a
performance.
Second: The value added for a good reading seldom has much to do with those
things that are already in the text. It has to do with, yes, the choices
that the reader makes in how to interpret or render the stuff that's in the
text; but it also has to do with how to render the stuff that's either not
in the text (what it makes him/her feel or think, etc.), or that is in the
text in ways that no reader will be able to deal with for quite a while.
('Biff's tone oozed. "Oh, but you look wonderful, dear." There was a glint
in his eye that I knew well, but Jane did not.') Or consider Rob Sawyer's
Kennedy impression in the reading many of us heard him give some months
back: Kennedy's not even named in the text, except by implications that only
a human would get. Not naming Kennedy has a positive impact on the
story-reading experience, because you're allowed to discover who it is that
the alien is talking about as you read the words. You could mark that up,
though, without having a negative impact on the experience: You discover it
by hearing the impression.
Good readings are performances. Performance involves choice. What I'm
suggesting is to take the automated reading to a new level -- one analogous
to that enabled by MIDI on a good keyboard set, which is absolutely not
possible right now or in the truly foreseeable future (i.e., the future that
comes before the readers have AI that allows them to interpret the meaning
of texts). (To say that it's likely to happen because we've done these
things before is not what I mean by 'foreseeable' in this context, because
we don't yet have an idea of how it would be done.)
I feel we're speaking at cross-purposes. My broader argument is that there
are applications for a speech markup language. The automated reading of blog
posts is simply what I see as an early application. This is not something
that would take huge research funding to work out -- the markup spec could
be mapped out in a weekend by someone familiar with XML specification,
critiqued over a period of time. The particulars could be figured out with
low-tech by grad students. Hell, I'd be surprised if there hadn't already
been Media Lab projects to do exactly this kind of stuff.
At the same time, I'm arguing that plain, un-marked-up text will only be
able to approach the automated readabiltiy of marked-up text when the
'reader' has some level of linguistically-capable AI.
What are the implications for performance? If I'm right, it's that the
middle will wither. A few really skilled voice performers will make a good
deal of money, and then there will be a big absent-middle down to the level
of the radio voiceover artist. (Most of the good ones make a decent
middle-class living, but that's about it.) I think that's the same thing
that happens in the music business: You get super-mega acts, like Britney or
Justin, and you get middle-class acts like Steve Earle, and there's not much
in between. The same thing will probably happen in publishing (except
writers won't make as much money).
--
eric scoles ([email protected])
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