Talk:Whispering

Whispering in other languages/merge with Breathy voice?
Bots keep linking this page to Mrmr because there were links in the other direction, but Mrmr is actually the name of a revue, it has nothing to do with whispering. I removed the links from Mrmr as well as from here, but to stop this from happening again we really need to find the actual French equivalent, and the equivalent in other languages. The obvious choice would be the Murmure, but that page links to Breathy voice. Apparently in English there is a clear distinction between whispering and breathy voice, at least for linguists. Is there a linguist out there who knows which of these two terms the French Murmure is closest to, and what is the French equivalent for the other word? The same goes for other languages... this page links to words for whispering in several other languages, but breathy voice only links to French. Soon enough, the bots look at all those pages in other languages, see that they link both to this page and probably to Mrmr, and put the erroneous links back (I will try to delete them in other languages to make sure that doesn't happen, but I can never be sure whether the pages are about whispering or really about Mrmr.) So we need to figure out the appropriate technical terms in the other languages.

Otherwise, since this article is pretty short, and it will probably be quite difficult to find distinct words for whispering and breathy voice in other languages, probably the easiest thing to do would be to merge it with Breathy voice. I'll leave it to a linguist to decide. --Angelastic (talk) 16:31, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it should be merged, as there are important linguistic differences between breathy voice (which, for example, is used phonemically in several languages) and whisper (which is not).

I think that whisper, rather than breathy voice, is closer to French murmure, but I am not certain.

I am a new user, but am willing to expand this article a bit to make it more clear. Whisper is my area of expertise. I am a phonetician, but not remotely notable enough for this to be a conflict of interest (I'm not going to start citing myself). I will go through it in the days to come and see what I can put together. (As it's a short article right now, this may amount to a major change.) --TimothyMills (talk) 15:30, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Having read the stub article on Murmure (with my rudimentary French), I suspect that it is referring to breathy voice. At least, that is what the IPA symbol they use indicates. I'll see if I can find someone offline who can verify what murmure really translates to in English.

Unfortunately, the French article seems to also suggest that Murmure applies only to stops (des occlusives), which is not true. It'll take a more proficient French-speaker to fix that. The English-language article on Breathy_voice is a solid article.

--TimothyMills (talk) 10:21, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Latin
Is there a reason the Latin translation is given in the lede? It's interesting, but doesn't seem to reflect on the etymology of the word or origin of the practice or anything. I'll try to remember to come check back in a day or two and if nobody responds I'll remove it. CallmeNiel (talk) 20:30, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree. Removing it now. TimothyMills (talk) 18:47, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Vocal cords / vocal folds
In form, the structures in the larynx which vibrate to generate voicing in speech are more fold-like than cord-like, and so phoneticians generally refer to them as "vocal folds", and avoid "vocal cords". For support, I can cite several textbooks sitting on my shelves, which are used extensively in university linguistics teaching and have a long history of use.

Contemporary Linguistic Analysis, edited by William O'Grady and John Archibald (7th edition) Phonetics: Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception, by Henning Reetz and Allard Jongman Speech Science Primer, by Gloria J. Borden, Katherine S. Harris, and Lawrence J. Raphael (3rd edition)

It is also the term preferred in the article about them: vocal folds.

I am making the change now as a minor edit.

TimothyMills (talk) 18:58, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Voice recognition while whispering
An empirical test using Android's text-to-speech with Google Translate and the home screen Google search seems to falsify the claim that voice recognition doesn't work while whispering. I tried this both in my native language (Finnish) and English with pangrams. Whispering didn't largely impact the quality of the results. (A minor degradation was found with Finnish and is to be expected as the primary function of the models is not whispering. Outside interference is also to be blamed, that is to say: my parents started vacuuming. Also, the Finnish tts is slightly weaker than the English one in general.)

The sources for this claim are a Quora page retrieved many moons ago (in 2013) and a paper detailing the biological mechanics of whispering without even mentioning voice recognition. The first answer to the Quora question refers to feature based recognition which is no longer state of the art. A second answer given in 2016 states (quote):

> With the advent of Deep Neural Networks whispered speech recognition now works fairly reliably. From a speech science POV the key observation is that the excitation of the vocal folds is missing in whispered speech however the frequency response of the vocal tract is unchanged. Of course whispered speech is harder to understand/recognize since the dynamic range and overall SNR is greatly reduced.

Should the claim be removed?

FSMnArmosta (talk) 10:40, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

I think so. Not only is there shaky empirical support for the claim, but it seems out of place in the introduction of this article. If it is mentioned, it should be in a later section. I also think the comparison to normal speech could be made clearer in a new section, perhaps titled "Comparison to normal speech".

TimothyMills (talk) 16:30, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Whispering fish
Fish are not equipped with anything like vocal cords. The croaking gouramis may produce sound with its pectoral fins, but that is completely unrelated to whispering. Removing this reference from the article.

Herbee (talk) 14:12, 5 September 2018 (UTC)