1 Sonic is a simple algorithm for speeding up or slowing down speech. However, 2 it's optimized for speed ups of over 2X, unlike previous algorithms for changing 3 speech rate. The Sonic library is a very simple ANSI C library that is designed 4 to easily be integrated into streaming voice applications, like TTS back ends. 5 6 The primary motivation behind Sonic is to enable the blind and visually impaired 7 to improve their productivity with open source speech engines, like espeak. 8 Sonic can also be used by the sighted. For example, Sonic can improve the 9 experience of listening to an audio book on an Android phone. 10 11 A native Java port of Sonic is in Sonic.java. Main.java is a simple example of 12 how to use Sonic.java. To play with it, you'll need a "talking.wav" file in the 13 current directory, and you'll want to change the speed, pitch or other 14 parameters manually in Main.java, in the main method. 15 16 Sonic is Copyright 2010, 2011, Bill Cox, all rights reserved. It is released 17 under the Apache 2.0 license, to promote usage as widely as possible. 18 19 Performance test: 20 21 I sped up a 751958176 byte wav file with sonic (a 9 hour, 28 minute mono audio 22 file encoded at 16-bit 11.KHz), but with the output writing disabled. The 23 reported time, running Ubuntu 11.04 on my HP Pavilion dm4 laptop was: 24 25 real 0m50.839s 26 user 0m47.370s 27 sys 0m0.620s 28 29 The Java version is not much slower. It reported: 30 31 real 0m52.043s 32 user 0m51.190s 33 sys 0m0.310s 34 35 Author: Bill Cox 36 email: waywardgeek (a] gmail.com 37
