Robots speech – Japanese pneumatic style

There are now several well-established ways to create artificial voices – some take a purely electronic approach, while others, like Professor Hideyuki Sawada at Kagawa University, Japan, have explored electro-mechanical methods. The video above shows how pneumatically-driven artificial lips, tongues, voicebox and nasal resonating cavities might simulate speech. Unfortunately, the mpeg videos linked-to via the […]

Elephant Trumpets, the Acoustics of

“Because trumpeting is often associated with intensely social events, expressing the very high level of excitement and importance of the event, it is not easy to ask elephants for trumpet calls!” But that did not deter a research team at the Laboratoire d’Acoustique de l’Université du Maine, Le Mans, France (assisted by the Zoo de […]

Improbable Research