Talking Birds and Ultra-ventriloquism

To inspect the mystery of the speech production

Abstract

In order to solve the mystery of the speech production that talking birds and ultra-ventriloquist have acquired, their speech signals obtained in the Helium-Oxygen atmosphere were compared with those in the normal atmosphere. Furthermore, labial monosyllables /pa/ and /mo/ which the ventriloquist produced without lip movement were analyzed based on both spectral pattern and perceptual experiment. From the experimental results regarding the Helium voices, it was found that the vowel production mechanism of mynah-bird is completely different from parakeet while the parakeet and the ventriloquist produce the vowels in the same manner of normal speaker. However, the spectral pattern and the perception of /pa/ and /mo/ indicate that the ventriloquist as well as the talking birds produces those labial monosyllables in the different way of normal speaker.