Sine Wave Speech in Python

A Python package for sine wave speech. What’s that? Let’s listen to an example. Can you tell what the voice is saying? I bet not:

This sound has been turned into sine wave speech. Now listen to the original:

If you go back and listen to the sine wave speech again, you’ll probably be able to understand it. This is a really surprising effect: after you hear a few before-and-after examples, the originally unintelligible sine wave speech becomes easy to follow. Check out this video for a longer example.

I stumbled upon sine wave speech accidentally when researching something for my Master’s thesis and thought it’s really cool. But to my surprise, no Python implementations were around: the only implementation I found was one by Dan Ellis from 1996, from before I was born! I wanted to provide a modern implementation for people who’d want to play around with this cool effect.

I later built upon this library with sinewavespeech.com.