RE: Voice recognition

["Krispen Hartung" <info@krispenhartung.com>]

Yes, I guess unless you're a fighter pilot and using cutting edge,
government funded technology, we're stuck in the waiting game. Although,
you'd think if I can utter "caaaaab" into my voice activated cell phone,
with a drunken slur and a bunch of animals screaming in the background,
and the phone successfully recognizes my voice with very minor training,
that we could get this to work for a basic one syllable command to
switch MIDI.  :)

Just dreaming...my foot is fine.

K-

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Larson [mailto:Jeffrey.Larson@Sun.COM] 
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2005 8:21 PM
To: info@krispenhartung.com
Cc: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: Voice recognition


Krispen Hartung wrote:
 > Off this topic, has anyone explored the concept of voice
 > recognition-activated MIDI switching?  You could wear a head set or
cell  > phone-like mic that connected to the computer....when you said,
let's  > say, "Ring Mod", the computer would recognize the command and
make the  > MIDI change to your rack gear.

This has been a holy grail of man/machine interfaces for a long time.
Much progress has been made, but they still tend to be a bit quirky. I'm
not familiar with any products specifically for musical use, but of the
ones that I've seen, you have to have a clean quiet signal and e n u c i
a t e  v e r y  c l e a r l y.  Most systems require "training" where
they make you speak a few words or phrases in order to analyze the
characteristics of your voice.  Once trained, they can only recognize a
similar sounding voice.  The difference between male and female (pitch)
or between healthy and sick (timbre) will confuse it. When performing
live, you have the added complication of sound bleed from other sources.

I'm sure there are pieces you could hack together that under the right
circumstances would work.  But I'm not aware of anything that is
packaged and optimized for use by musicians.  Even if there were, it
would still be unreliable unless you could ensure a pristine signal
(i.e. no stage microphones).

In practice, nothing beats a dumb old foot switch.

Jeff