Between the Signs: The Speech Communication Podcast
by Stefan Hillmann
Between the Signs is a companion podcast to the lecture "Speech Communication" by Sebastian Möller at Technische Universität Berlin. Each episode is a short introduction to one chapter of the course: what the topic is about, why it matters, and which question it answers. The big picture, not the details.The series follows the chain that carries a thought from one head to another. What speech actually is. How a speech signal can be described at all. Where its properties come from in the human vocal tract. How a recording can be taken apart again. What the ear does with it, and what it fails to hear. How a phone call survives being squeezed to a fraction of its data. And how machines learned to listen, to talk, and to hold a conversation.The episodes are made for students preparing for the next session, but they need no prior reading and nothing in front of you: no slides, no formulas, no figures. Anyone curious about how speech works — as physics, as linguistics and as engineering —
Episodes
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Pointing While Talking (Chapter 8)
The final episode. Speech is fast, expressive and available almost anywhere, and it leaves hands and eyes free — but it is serial and fleeting, and no improvement in speech technology will make a spoken list of twelve train connections memorable. So systems learn to combine channels: what a…
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Machines That Talk (Chapter 7, part 2)
Teaching a machine to speak means inventing everything the text leaves out — and getting it right, because listeners use melody and rhythm to repair what they did not quite catch. This episode traces four generations of talking machines, from modelling the human speech apparatus to gluing…
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Machines That Listen (Chapter 7, part 1)
The first of two episodes on the largest chapter of the lecture. Why recognizing speech cannot possibly work by looking things up: there are no gaps between spoken words, every sound is smeared into its neighbours, and the same sentence is never twice the same signal. The way out was to stop...
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Sixty-Four Thousand Bits, or Thirteen (Chapter 6)
How a phone call survives being squeezed, told as three ideas rather than a catalogue of codecs. Spend bits where they do the most good, which is why quantization steps are fine near zero and coarse further out. Do not send what the receiver could have guessed, and shape the unavoidable error so...
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What the Ear Throws Away (Chapter 5)
Hearing is not measurement. This episode follows sound through an ear that filters by direction, solves the problem of getting sound from air into liquid, and performs a frequency analysis mechanically, by letting a travelling wave peak at a different place for every frequency. Then the part that...
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Taking a Voice Apart (Chapter 4)
A detective problem, and three ways to solve it. How a spectrum is measured in the first place, and why it helps to build the analysis filters so that they resemble the ear. Why cutting a short slice out of a signal changes what you see. Then the trick worth remembering: the logarithm turns a...
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The Instrument You Have Never Seen (Chapter 3)
Where the properties of a speech signal come from. Two ways of making a sound, one of them driven by a lovely piece of physics at the vocal folds, and the observation that whispering replaces the voiced source entirely without costing a single word — so the words apparently do not live in the...
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Four Ways to Look at a Voice (Chapter 2)
There is no single right way to describe a speech signal, and each way reveals something an engineer can use. As a shape over time, as a mixture of frequencies, as a random process, and as a stream of numbers. This episode is about why engineers reach for frequencies, why speech has to be cut…
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From One Head to Another (Chapter 1)
The opening episode sets up the whole lecture. Speech as a system of signs, and the uncomfortable insight that a system can transmit information perfectly and still fail to transmit meaning. The building blocks of language, from the smallest units that change meaning to the melody and rhythm that...
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Before We Begin
A short introduction to the series. Each episode gives the big picture of one chapter of the lecture and answers a single question above all: why does this topic matter for speech communication? The details stay where they belong, in the lecture and the script. This first episode explains how the...
About this show
Between the Signs is a companion podcast to the lecture "Speech Communication" by Sebastian Möller at Technische Universität Berlin. Each episode is a short introduction to one chapter of the course: what the topic is about, why it matters, and which question it answers. The big picture, not the details.The series follows the chain that carries a thought from one head to another. What speech actually is. How a speech signal can be described at all. Where its properties come from in the human vocal tract. How a recording can be taken apart again. What the ear does with it, and what it fails to hear. How a phone call survives being squeezed to a fraction of its data. And how machines learned to listen, to talk, and to hold a conversation.The episodes are made for students preparing for the next session, but they need no prior reading and nothing in front of you: no slides, no formulas, no figures. Anyone curious about how speech works — as physics, as linguistics and as engineering —
Hosted by
Stefan Hillmann