If I am listening to someone but not paying much attention to it and suddenly understand that there was a question asked, my first reaction often is - 'what did you say?". But before hearing the question again I already answer, usually at the same time with the repeated question and then we both can ask - 'what? what did you say?' as neither of us was listening any more. I always thought that I suddenly understood what I had been asked. Now I found out that it is my temporary memory acting out and helping me reproduce the information and bringing me the understanding of my partner in conversation.
We have all attended numerous lectures given by a variety of lecturers. I am sure I do not speak for myself alone if I say that it is rather exhaustive to sit an hour and a half in a lecture if the voice of professor is silent, monotonic and the text far from dynamic. I have always thought it is just boring. Now I know that trying to get that information has just been silly optimism. I simply do not receive it as my ears and consciousness can not work that message out.. the signal has been weak. While hearing text spoken in monotonic voice and having little clue about the meaning of the text it becomes technically difficult for the receiver to get the message.
On the other hand, we can perceive a voice and message even if it has strong background noise and other voices around it. It is the cocktail party effect that lets us selectively hear one voice and get the message. This is human capability that is researched to develop into computational application for speech user interfaces - hand-free, eyes-free applications. The conclusion of given paper introduced me to another angle of user interfaces that I now wish to explore a bit more.
Thoughts on:
http://pubs.media.mit.edu/pubs/papers/arons_AVIOSJ92_cocktail_party_effect.pdf
Good night.
We have all attended numerous lectures given by a variety of lecturers. I am sure I do not speak for myself alone if I say that it is rather exhaustive to sit an hour and a half in a lecture if the voice of professor is silent, monotonic and the text far from dynamic. I have always thought it is just boring. Now I know that trying to get that information has just been silly optimism. I simply do not receive it as my ears and consciousness can not work that message out.. the signal has been weak. While hearing text spoken in monotonic voice and having little clue about the meaning of the text it becomes technically difficult for the receiver to get the message.
On the other hand, we can perceive a voice and message even if it has strong background noise and other voices around it. It is the cocktail party effect that lets us selectively hear one voice and get the message. This is human capability that is researched to develop into computational application for speech user interfaces - hand-free, eyes-free applications. The conclusion of given paper introduced me to another angle of user interfaces that I now wish to explore a bit more.
Thoughts on:
http://pubs.media.mit.edu/pubs/papers/arons_AVIOSJ92_cocktail_party_effect.pdf
Good night.
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ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you on the monotonous voice part. And with the question "What did you say" and then answering it before even listening to the real answer. I think this has appeared before with different people.
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