VISUALIZE ME MOVIE
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I don’t want to give away any spoilers because it’s such a great movie, but what I can reveal is that Kane is fond of what “Rosebud” refers to. The main character, Charles Foster Kane, utters this word with his last breath, and throughout the movie, audiences ponder not only the meaning of but also Kane’s relationship to the word.

VISUALIZE ME MOVIE

The sound I have chosen for this example is a word, and it’s probably one of the most enigmatic utterances in cinematic history: “Rosebud” from the movie Citizen Kane (1941). Whit this little tool, one can not only record mono and stereo sounds, one can also load pre-recorded sounds in order to visualize a couple of the kinds of parameters that I’ve listed above.

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What you see above is a screenshot I have taken with the free software, Praat (click the link to download). I have put “better” in parentheses here for a reason because there are already quite a number of programs available that do just that. But then I had my first couple of SIF meetings, and I am now working on a project designed to find (better), more innovative ways of visualizing prerecorded voices along a set of specific parameters, enabling researchers to export parameter-related data for quantitative as well as qualitative analysis. To be honest, however, up until a week ago, that topic had never really crossed my mind.

Not so with pre-recorded speech, of course, which provides researchers with a potent avenue to capture and visualize the dynamic interplay of parameters that shape the human voice, and the way it is perceived. The only problem is: the human voice is a fleeting thing, which makes it virtually impossible to measure and analyze the interplay between all of those parameters in real-time. Which-during the act of listening-leave us with impressions about the speaker that go beyond content and context as well as the mere level of sound. Pitch, tone, timbre, rhythm, inflection, and emphasis among others,

And this leads us to the well-grounded assumption that the human voice is shaped by the relative relationship of various parameters such as Succinctly put, when we only have the sound of a voice available, we are often tempted to fill in the blanks of the speaker’s personality. Moreover, not only do we imagine physical attributes, we also equip the voice with certain characteristics that the speaker presumably has. Now, why might this be worth noting? The inference that we can draw is that there are certain cues embedded in the human voice which, when all we have is sound, motivate us to craft an idea of the speaker in our heads. In any event, I dare you to ask yourself if you’ve ever wondered what the agent on the line might actually look like? I am sure that we’ve all done that at one point or the other, and I am also speculating that 9 out of 10 times our intuition would fail us and the agent on the other line doesn’t look anything like the image we crafted of him or her in our minds. Consider the following everyday life situation: you’ve bought a defective item, and now you are discussing return policies with a customer service agent over the phone…then maybe you are not discussing return policies at all but you want to place an order over the phone.

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