The Text and the Voice

Written to save careers one voice at a time through scientifically proven methods and advice, this resource teaches people how to protect and improve one of their most valuable assets: their speaking voice. Simple explanations of vocal anatomy and up-to-date instruction for vocal injury prevention are accompanied by illustrations, photographs, and FAQs. An audio CD of easy-to-follow vocal-strengthening exercises--including Hum and Chew, Puppy Dog Whimper, Sirens, Lip Trills, and Tongue Twisters--is also included, along with information on breathing basics, vocal-cord vibration, and working with students who have medical complications such as asthma, acid reflux, or anxiety.

Get the Knowledge Without the College! You are a writer. You dream of sharing your words with the world, and you're willing to put in the hard work to achieve success. You may have even considered earning your MFA, but for whatever reason--tuition costs, the time commitment, or other responsibilities--you've never been able to do it. Or maybe you've been looking for a self-guided approach so you don't have to go back to school. This book is for you. DIY MFA is the do-it-yourself alternative to a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. By combining the three main components of a traditional MFA--writing, reading, and community--it teaches you how to craft compelling stories, engage your readers, and publish your work. Inside you'll learn how to: • Set customized goals for writing and learning. • Generate ideas on demand. • Outline your book from beginning to end. • Breathe life into your characters. • Master point of view, voice, dialogue, and more. • Read with a "writer's eye" to emulate the techniques of others. • Network like a pro, get the most out of writing workshops, and submit your work successfully. Writing belongs to everyone--not only those who earn a degree. With DIY MFA, you can take charge of your writing, produce high-quality work, get published, and build a writing career.

VOICE AND SPEECH TRAINING IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM: CONVERSATIONS WITH MASTER TEACHERS

A New York Times bestselling writer explores what our unique sonic signature reveals about our species, our culture, and each one of us. Finally, a vital topic that has never had its own book gets its due. There’s no shortage of books about public speaking or language or song. But until now, there has been no book about the miracle that underlies them all—the human voice itself. And there are few writers who could take on this surprisingly vast topic with more artistry and expertise than John Colapinto. Beginning with the novel—and compelling—argument that our ability to speak is what made us the planet’s dominant species, he guides us from the voice’s beginnings in lungfish millions of years ago to its culmination in the talent of Pavoratti, Martin Luther King Jr., and Beyoncé—and each of us, every day. Along the way, he shows us why the voice is the most efficient, effective means of communication ever devised: it works in all directions, in all weathers, even in the dark, and it can be calibrated to reach one other person or thousands. He reveals why speech is the single most complex and intricate activity humans can perform. He travels up the Amazon to meet the Piraha, a reclusive tribe whose singular language, more musical than any other, can help us hear how melodic principles underpin every word we utter. He heads up to Harvard to see how professional voices are helped and healed, and he ventures out on the campaign trail to see how demagogues wield their voices as weapons. As far-reaching as this book is, much of the delight of reading it lies in how intimate it feels. Everything Colapinto tells us can be tested by our own lungs and mouths and ears and brains. He shows us that, for those who pay attention, the voice is an eloquent means of communicating not only what the speaker means, but also their mood, sexual preference, age, income, even psychological and physical illness. It overstates the case only slightly to say that anyone who talks, or sings, or listens will find a rich trove of thrills in This Is the Voice.

Speech and Voice Science, Fourth Edition is the only textbook to provide comprehensive and detailed information on both voice source and vocal tract contributions to speech production. In addition, it is the only textbook to address dialectical and nonnative language differences in vowel and consonant production, bias in perception of speaker identity, and prosody (suprasegmental features) in detail. With the new edition, clinical application is integrated throughout the text. Due to its highly readable writing style being user-friendly for all levels of students, instructors report using this book for a wide variety of courses, including undergraduate and graduate courses in acoustic phonetics, speech science, instrumentation, and voice disorders. Heavily revised and updated, this fourth edition offers multiple new resources for instructors and students to enhance classroom learning and active student participation. At the same time, this text provides flexibility to allow instructors to construct a classroom learning experience that best suits their course objectives. Speech and Voice Science now has an accompanying workbook for students by Alison Behrman and Donald Finan! New to the Fourth Edition: * Sixteen new illustrations and nineteen revised illustrations, many now in color * New coverage of topics related to diversity, including: * Dialectical and nonnative language differences in vowel and consonant production and what makes all of us have an “accent” (Chapter 7—Vowels and Chapter 8—Consonants) * How suprasegmental features are shaped by dialect and accent (Chapter 9—Prosody) * Perception of speaker identity, including race/ethnicity, gender, and accent (Chapter 11– Speech Perception) * Increased focus on clinical application throughout each chapter, including three new sections * Updated Chapter 4 (Breathing) includes enhanced discussion of speech breathing and new accompanying illustrations. * Updated Chapter 10 (Theories of Speech Production) now includes the DIVA Model, motor learning theory, and clinical applications * Updated Chapter 11 (Speech Perception) now includes revised Motor Learning theory, Mirror Neurons, and clinical applications *Expanded guide for students on best practices for studying in Chapter 1(Introduction) Key Features: * A two-color interior to provide increased readability * Heavily illustrated, including color figures, to enhance information provided in the text * Forty-nine spectrogram figures provide increased clarity of key acoustic features of vowels and consonants * Fourteen clinical cases throughout the book to help students apply speech science principles to clinical practice Disclaimer: Please note that ancillary content (such as documents, audio, and video, etc.) may not be included as published in the original print version of this book.

An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously featured HAL, a computer with the ability to hold lengthy conversations with his fellow space travelers. More than forty years later, we have advanced computer technology that Kubrick never imagined, but we do not have computers that talk and understand speech as HAL did. Is it a failure of our technology that we have not gotten much further than an automated voice that tells us to "say or press 1"? Or is there something fundamental in human language and speech that we do not yet understand deeply enough to be able to replicate in a computer? In The Voice in the Machine, Roberto Pieraccini examines six decades of work in science and technology to develop computers that can interact with humans using speech and the industry that has arisen around the quest for these technologies. He shows that although the computers today that understand speech may not have HAL's capacity for conversation, they have capabilities that make them usable in many applications today and are on a fast track of improvement and innovation. Pieraccini describes the evolution of speech recognition and speech understanding processes from waveform methods to artificial intelligence approaches to statistical learning and modeling of human speech based on a rigorous mathematical model--specifically, Hidden Markov Models (HMM). He details the development of dialog systems, the ability to produce speech, and the process of bringing talking machines to the market. Finally, he asks a question that only the future can answer: will we end up with HAL-like computers or something completely unexpected?