Hearing voices

Even efforts in the '70s and '80s to model computerized voices more closely on human speech resulted in what Stephen Springer, a design director at SpeechWorks, a Boston-based speech-recognition software company, calls "the funny-sounding computer systems that always sounded" - he imitates, with heavy accent - "like a drunken Swede when they talked to you." ("No offense to your Swedish readers," he adds, "that's kind of industry shorthand.")

That more-or-less featureless monotone, known professionally as "flat affect," is often also the butt of complaints about telemarketers: Not only do they call just at suppertime, but they sound half dead.

"If you're at dinner and the phone rings, and you pick it up and hear someone reading off a joyless script," says Mr. Springer, "your mind turns immediately to 'How can I get this person off the phone?' You're already steeling yourself, and they've maybe said six words to you. They're not even bad words."

But parents and teachers of kids diagnosed with neurological conditions like autism and Asperger's Syndrome know in a serious way the communicative cost of an underdeveloped sense of speech prosody. People with severe autism operate in a sort of linguistically sealed environment, unable to decode or produce emotional voice cues; their voices often come across as robotic or monotone.

"And in school," asks Patricia Prelock, autism and language-learning disabilities specialist at the University of Vermont, "if the teacher says, 'It's awfully noisy in here,' and her voice is angry or upset, how is the child who doesn't hear those emotions going to know to be quiet?"

The number of cases of autism in the US is ten times what it was a decade ago, so there's a great deal of study now being done about how autistic children's brains short-circuit prosody. Research-ers hope their work will yield better speech and language therapy techniques for people with a host of communication disorders. In most cases, they say, prosody, can indeed be taught.

But in other instances, particularly reacting to sounds and voices, the body seems to have a mind of its own. We're programmed, for instance, to react to a 20-hertz rumble (roughly the frequency of a distant elephant stampede) with terror, and to certain musical frequencies with deep sympathy.

"That was Martin Luther King, in his 'I Have a Dream' speech," says Edward Komissarchick, vice president of BetterAccent, a softwaremaker that helps non-native speakers map their vocal patterns to more closely mimic those of native English speakers. In school, he read a study that analyzed tapes of Dr. King's famous speech, and compared them to recordings of King's regular speaking voice.

Delivering the speech, the pitch of King's voice was much higher than that of his normal voice - a frequency usually only heard in music. "When he said, 'I have a dream,' he didn't speak," Dr. Komissarchick says, "He sang. That's how he created the magic of that."

In fact, says Andrews, whether or not we realize it, the voice always is a performance. For 25 years, she directed Indiana University's speech and language clinic, which worked closely with the nearby Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Over the years, in addition to stuttering kids and shy corporate execs, Andrews coached many transgender clients in a particular prosodic application: making the vocal transition from male to female.

That meant teaching them to control their voice pitch and mimic typically female voice patterns - a more musical cadence, an upswing at the end of a sentence. For transgender people, Andrews explains, "usually the voice is the big giveaway, in terms of "passing".... When they talk, if it sounds really masculine, heads usually turn, and that's what they're really afraid of."

As are we all, she says: "Like the teen-ager who moves from Georgia to California and boom, drops her accent, at some level, we're always trying to fit in."

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