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Laughing, talking & singing while breathing in
A recent study reported that babies laugh both while inhaling and exhaling, in contrast to most adults who just do it while exhaling. The work was done by Disa Sauter, from the University of Amsterdam, “Adult humans sometimes laugh on the inhale but the proportion is markedly different from that of infants’ and chimps’ laughs.” I…
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How do you say scone?
Time to tackle the most important issue of the day, the pronunciation of scone. Do you say scone so it rhymes with ‘gone’ or ‘stone’? There is nothing perhaps more likely to cause an argument over pronunciation down the pub than that particular word. Why saying the name of a cake should have become quite so controversial and…
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Do smart digital assistants really threaten regional accents?
Is Alexa really a threat to regional accents?
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Beat box of tricks
How beatboxers create a snare drum
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AI must learn from voice science
Voice control: why AI must resist our bad habit of stereotyping human speech Parrot fashion. Shutterstock Voice control gadgets – such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home or Apple’s Homepod – are becoming increasingly popular, but people should pause for thought about advances in machine learning that could lead to applications understanding different emotions in speech.…
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Did acoustics affect where palaeolithic cave 'art' was painted?
Did the first large scale scientific test of the theory that acoustics affected where palaeolithic cave ‘art’ was painted, support the hypothesis? The lead author on the paper explains.
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Scientists are trying to uncover what makes Stradivarius violins special – but are they wasting their time?
Hunting for the Holy Grail of violin making – is there really a Strad secret to be found?
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Playing the Echo
A recording of a remarkable percussion piece that plays with the echo in the reading room of Manchester Central Library.
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360 Video of Reverberation Chamber
Here is another 360 video recorded with spatial audio – so reach for your headphones. The heavy reverberation creates some interesting aural effects, some of them probably due to how YouTube creates the binaural rendering and are not real. So I’ve done an anechoic chamber in 360 video, and now a reverberant space. What next?