In Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (1956 ), 4, 14-23.
The use of spectrograms and a pattern playback for research on speech has the unique advantage that it permits the study of isolated acoustic cues for speech perception. This method has shown that the consecutive sounds of the language are usually so intimately connected that they cannot be separated and recombined in a different order without a serious loss in intelligibility. Formant transitions, which often characterize the consonants, are found to fall into well-defined patterns and groups. The knowledge gained by studies with synthetic speech has guided the construction of a speech synthesizer which copies the sounds generated by the human speech organs and which can be operated from the information found in spectrograms.
