The deaf and people who have lost their voices may someday have a new
way to speak, thanks to the Digital Ventriloquist Actor, or DiVA.
Developed at the University of British
Columbia, the speech-production system makes use of high-tech gloves
equipped with sensors and tracked in three-dimensional space. The person
operating it creates vowel sounds by opening the right hand (different
gestures determine the pitch and tonality) and "soft" consonants like
r's and z's by closing that hand. Hard consonants are partly created by
tapping the left-hand fingers.
It takes about 100 hours of training
to learn to speak intelligibly using DiVA, say its creators, who showed
it off at the recent meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. The technology has intrigued avant-garde
musicians, who are drawn to its not-quite-human sound.
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