[HN Gopher] Can text be made to sound more than just its words? ...
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Can text be made to sound more than just its words? (2022)
Author : tobr
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-11-02 22:17 UTC (13 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| realty_geek wrote:
| I've always wondered about this.
|
| In Akan languages it is not difficult to conceive of how the same
| word can be written in different ways to convey another
| dimension.
|
| Anyone who speaks an akan language will understand that each of
| these words below means good but with a slightly different
| emphasis.
|
| papa papaaapa papapapapapa
|
| What is the linguistic term for this concept?
| pegasus wrote:
| Apparently, it's called partial reduplication or emphatic
| doubling.
| realty_geek wrote:
| Thanks, that is helpful.
|
| Chatgpt also explained the concept of ideophones which was
| helpful:
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/69187b3e-7948-8001-9fea-2b4412d5a7.
| ..
| mati365 wrote:
| Consider learning Polish. Kurwa sounds exactly as it looks.
| 58937928709622 wrote:
| moze morze rzeka rzeka
| voxleone wrote:
| Emojis absolutely have their place here. They can add tone,
| nuance, and a bit of humanity where plain text can feel flat.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I feel like emojis is the lazy persons way of adding tone,
| nuance and humanity, when you don't know how to do so by only
| writing. Don't want to imply it's wrong, it's valid to be lazy,
| especially when it comes to improving communication, but I find
| myself thinking "How can I make sure this comes across as the
| joke it is?" and after one or two minute I just end up slapping
| a wink emoji at the end and don't rewrite the text at all, as
| the lazy person I am.
| jonplackett wrote:
| When you only want to write w a single word back though + and
| emoji, there's not a lot of space to add tone!
| pnut wrote:
| An idea compressed down into a single character is elegant
| and efficient.
| shomp wrote:
| The book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is a tremendous
| study in this area, Scott shows how you can add abstract meanings
| to words and pictures through illustration.
| foofoo12 wrote:
| Very interesting idea. I remember reading that in visual spoken
| communications, only 20% is the actual words. The rest is tone of
| voice, body language, context, emphasis, expressions, ... all
| that stuff.
|
| I don't know if 20% is correct, but I feel it's very close to it.
| I also think a lot of internet arguments happen as a direct
| result of miscommunication. Emojis are great, but they get abused
| to the point that HN filters them out. Perhaps allow readers to
| toggle if they want to see emojis or not?
| Isognoviastoma wrote:
| Easy to check: try to speak with someone talking foreign
| language you don't know and estimate what percentage of what
| they said you understood from tone of voice etc. I would guess
| it's less than 80%.
| cenamus wrote:
| Maybe also control for cultural similarity, but I definitely
| agree
| foofoo12 wrote:
| That's very easy and very wrong. Let's say you have a 100
| page book. Page 1 contains fundamental knowledge that allows
| you to understand the rest of it. If you skip page 1 then you
| won't understand the other 99.
|
| How much of the book will you understand if you only read
| page 1?
| eszed wrote:
| There's an acting exercise (it's from Joan Littlewood via Clive
| Barker) where one speaks "gibberish" - making language sounds,
| but not words - which, almost automatically, once they drop
| their terror of doing it, opens students up to all of those
| other avenues of communication. Later, you can switch students
| back and forth between the script and gibberish, and it becomes
| plain that if you can't play a scene as clearly (to those in
| it, not considering the audience) in gibberish as you can with
| words then you don't fully understand it.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Something like this would be great for karaoke! Especially for
| the long held notes
| https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1614435041764859907
| pimlottc wrote:
| Another thing to look at would be how games like Rock Band and
| Guitar Hero show lyrics
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Reminds me of how the captions were done in Tony Scott's _Man on
| Fire_ (2004). It 's a pretty great movie too.
| andai wrote:
| Many moons ago I became quite obsessed with analyzing
| spectrograms on my computer.
|
| I would load up audio files in Audacity and look at them to see
| how the audio "looked", as a function of how intense each
| frequency is over time.
|
| You can even set a track to spectrogram while recording which
| allowed you to _see_ the sound in real time.
|
| Music also tends to be very beautiful in the spectrogram! And
| birdsong also. Sometimes I would _see_ a bird first, and only
| afterwards notice it in my field of hearing.
|
| I noticed while analyzing a podcast that I began to recognize
| common words like "you." I also noticed that I was able to easily
| distinguish between different people's voices.
|
| I had to wonder if I were deaf, or if I become deaf, I would
| suddenly have a strong motivation to learn how to read these
| things. To develop some kind of device which would show them to
| me 24 hours a day.
|
| I have not done this, but the project has remained in the back of
| my mind for over a decade.
|
| Does anyone else know more about this? Does such a device exist?
|
| I think that only some linguists learn how to read spectrograms.
| But it seems like something that might be extremely useful to any
| hearing impaired person?
|
| Relating to the article, I think one could quickly learn to read
| them fluently (e.g. as subtitles, perhaps overlaid on real life),
| and of course you get the tonal information built in for free--
| that's what a spectrogram _is!_
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| You're on the fringe of an area which in academia is called
| Sensory Substitution. A simplification of which is experiencing
| one of the five senses using different sense organs than usual.
| Classic examples of this are video cameras which represent
| their image as a matrix of vibrations on the subjects skin or
| as a sound.
| wincy wrote:
| I knew a blind guy who did a trial where he could "see" using
| his tongue. Pretty neat!
|
| https://news.wisc.edu/a-taste-of-vision-device-translates-fr...
| kiicia wrote:
| There was a guy who was able to recognize music just by looking
| at grooves of vinyl recording
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Lintgen
| failrate wrote:
| Comic books already use changes in font, weight, size, of text
| and the shape of the word balloon to indicate tone and
| expression.
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