No, this is not about BP. “How to wreck a nice beach” is an iconic phrase for speech recognition software, just as “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana” is for semantic disambiguation. The first is an automated rendering of “How to recognize speech.” The second consists of two sentences that look similar, but each word (except the indefinite article, I guess) plays a different role in the two sentences.

This comes to mind because there’s an interesting post by Repression Jones about a book on the history of the vocoder by Dave Tompkins, along with about an hour of vocoded sounds. Vocoders were originally designed to encrypt voice transmissions. But, run a music synthesizer through it and out the other end you get the 1960s.

Categories: misc dw