Natural sound - a technical perspective

[hopkins]

I am starting this thread to address some questions I have about "natural sound" and the ability of our systems to reproduce "natural sound". I don't really know where this is going to lead, but I'm going to go ahead and give it a shot anyway.

I want to start off by exploring the human voice.

- How does it work?
- Does every one of us (8 billion humans on this planet) realiy have a specific voice?
- Can we characterize these specificities? Are they quantifiable? What degree of precision is required?
- can voice be reproduced "artificially" (through a synthesizer)?
- What does this all imply in terms of sound recording and reproduction?

You can easily find answers to the first question . The voice mechanism is complex, but pretty well understood. There are thousands of videos on YouTube, for example, explaining how voice is produced.

Here's a cool video of our voice in action:

Taken individually, each muscle involved in producing sound changes/reacts at a given speed, which is probably "measureable" (I will look it up), but since there are so many muscles involved (over 100) we can easily understand that the frequency and degree of variations in the configuration of our vocal system could become infinitessimal. How small are these variations?

I want to know what scientific research tells us about some of these topics.

More to follow...

 

[Another Johnson]

Maybe potential posters sense that the 340 (and rising) pages over in @PeterA ’s thread are enough. Of course I could be incorrectly “reading the room.”

 

[hopkins]

Maybe potential posters sense that the 340 (and rising) pages over in @PeterA ’s thread are enough. Of course I could be incorrectly “reading the room.”

It's actually unrelated to his thread.