Imagine that you have a recording ten minutes long. Easy. Now imagine that this recording is a bar of chocolate ten minutes long. Not so easy, but bear with me.

The bar looks very uniform in flavour: it is the same colour along its entire length. But under the chocolate coating, someone has told you that there are many different flavours of filling dotted along the length of the bar out of sight, and in unknown locations. Somewhere inside the bar there are flavours you like: orange, strawberry, nougat, hazlenut, brazil nut. And flavours that you don’t like: fudge, apple crunch, praline. Naturally, you want to find and eat the flavours you like, and you want to avoid the ones you don’t like.

Now imagine further (sorry to push you) that there are traces of these flavours are on the surface of the bar, which is going to move past you. As it passes you will be allowed to lick the surface of the bar so that you can detect each flavour as it goes by. The bar will go past you at a fast pace, once only. You cannot control the speed, you cannot stop the progress of the bar. You will have to remember where the nice bits were so you can find them again, and relish them at leisure; you will also have to remember where the nasty bits are so you need not waste your time and appetite on them.

Difficult uh?

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to cut the bar - as it goes past you - into reasonable-sized chunks, and colour-code your favourite flavours as they pass by so that you can find them later? And colour-code the unliked flavours so that you can discard them?

At this point we need to withdraw from the chocolate fantasy - AudioNotetaker cannot do this for chocolate.

But it can do it for audio recordings! Section and colour-code the nice bits in real time - they appear as separate audio chunks that you can label and return to and savour at your leisure!

More serious evaluation here. And you can download a free trial here.

Image from here.

Sue Sullivan at IATEFL 2016 - Birmingham

Real live language - Speech stream and the brain box

Sue won a scholarship from International House, ‘Brita Haycraft Better Spoken English Scholarship’ to attend this conference (she lives and teaches in Christchurch New Zealand).

IH people were delighted with her talk, as was the attractive young lady who sat next to me during the talk - the only time we made eye-contact was right at the end, and she went ‘Wow!’

And it wasn’t my good looks that she went ‘Wow’ to. Below explains her ‘wow’.

Sue teaches adult immigrants, and part of her teaching involves ‘Speechstream’ work. She takes videos of TV programmes, and finds bits of fast speech that her students can neither understand nor de-code. (Sue says: ‘When they can’t hear it, rejoice!’). This is a wonderful circumstance, the perfect opportunity for learning. She gets the class to mimic the non-understood speech stream (Sue calls it a ‘gleep’) - they do it vocally, and with hand and arm gestures. This voice gym work is bottom-up processing without understanding. She wants the the non-understanding and pre-verbal handling to go on for some time, and she delays the resolution into words. The reasons for pre-verbal processing & no written word is to prevent the L1 language system (its pronunciation component) engaging with its suppositions about speech. She explained that working in this way forces open the 1st language learning processor.

The justification for this approach takes us into the brain - away from the bits that do conscious learning, to the basal ganglia - the location of control of those muscle movements that are not deliberate. Sue argues that the substance of language is physical - hence the vocal mouthing, and hand/arm gestures.

Sue says ‘Maybe five minutes of voice gym work and then resolve into words and meaning’. She also asserts (I love this bit) ‘When they want to understand too early, this is an obstacle to learning.’

Student reactions: the students sometimes say that in later hearings the recording has been slowed down - when in fact it has not, they are simply riding along comfortably with the wave of the stream of speech at a speed they are now familiar with. She teaches them other language skills as well, but this ‘speech stream’ work is something they ask for repeatedly.

Wow indeed. (Sadly, I never saw the ‘wow-er’ again).

Image from here