PITCH LOCK: AN INNOVATION WAITING TO BE EXPLOITED?

I didn’t think much about this, although one of the software tools that works with my MP3 jukebox has a Pitch Lock feature, and it was kind of fun slowing down and speeding up my favourite songs and second-guessing whether the artists should have picked a different tempo. But then this afternoon I was listening to one of my favourite songs from the new Sarah McLachlan album on the radio and it sounded funny — a lot faster than the version I was used to. I figured it was a remix so I listened through and the DJ announced it but didn’t say anything special about it. So I cued up the original and listened, and I knew it wasn’t a remix or my imagination. And then it occurred to me: The station is using Pitch Lock to speed up the songs by a just-less-than-noticeable amount so they can play more songs per hour and have more time for commercials.

So that got me thinking: What else could this be used for? Consider this fact: Average speech is about 140-160 WPM, and when we try to speak much faster than that our speech becomes slurred. When we’re thinking about what we’re saying, we talk even slower — 80-120 WPM. But we are able to comprehend properly-articulated speech of 210 and even 240 WPM without difficulty (average reading speed, by contrast, is 275 WPM, and speed readers top 800 WPM, though they don’t read every word). So that means that we could use Pitch Lock to accelerate speech by 50%, to a speed much faster than we could crisply deliver it, but with no loss in comprehension. And thanks to Pitch Lock, it would come out in the same deep, calm, enticing voice as the original, but deliver 50% more words, information or argument per minute. Still think this is a silly innovation?

Here are some commercial and time-saving applications that occurred to me right off the top of my head. I’m sure there are more:

1. Voice-mail message replay: Double the playback speed to whisk past the ums and ers and retrieve your messages in half the time.
2. Audio tape/audio book learning: Get through the tapes in 2/3 the time; learn 50% faster. Ditto for audiotaped or even videotaped conferences.
3. Advertising: Tell your customers, or your potential voters, 50% more in the minute you’re paying for. And maybe, by using up their idle brain time, reduce attention deficit syndrome and get people to pay closer attention to what you’re saying to boot. Or maybe not.
4. Language learning: Slow down the playback speed while you’re learning a language, and gradually increase it as you learn to parse the words faster and as your vocabularly grows. This could also be used for simultaneous translation in conferences, as long as they allowed short breaks after each speech for the translator to catch up.
5. Padding a good show: If the show you’re watching or the music or talk you’re listening to is wonderful, and you never want it to end, or if you’re a producer and the program’s a bit short, just use Pitch Lock to stretch it out a bit. After all, if Bernstein can get away with stretching Samuel Barber’s famous and extraordinary 6:50 Adagio for Strings into a piece that lasts over 10 minutes without adding any notes, maybe he’s on to something.
6. Studying and transcribing music: Having trouble following the chord changes or finger patterns in a favourite song? Slow it down with Pitch Lock and take your time. Likewise if you’re visually disadvantaged, slow down speeches to the pace at which you can comfortably take notes.

These and other applications could be exploited either at the time of recording, or at the time of playback. I’m sure the military and forensic sciences are already using this. It might also be used to listen to heart-beats, or study the songs of whales or birds, in slow motion yet at an audible pitch level. Or to determine an optimal speaking rate for computerized voice synthesizers (likely a lot faster than today’s unsophisticated versions).

What else could Pitch Lock be used for? And what if we combined it with other new technologies: For example, could we teach speech-recognizing computers to ‘speed talk’ much the way we ‘speed read’, to ‘read aloud’ or play back the common words that make up 80% of normal speech and are not essential to understanding at, say, 500 WPM, and the rest at 200 WPM, so we could become 400 WPM ‘speed listeners’ and ‘speed learners’? And in this increasingly oral/aural culture, might we then give up reading and writing entirely?