October 2018
Michael Stokes (CEO, Waveform Communications ; author, The Waveform Model of Vowel Perception and Production ) summarized his progress since 2012 in developing a method of using waveforms and spectrograms to identify vowels in human speech. Mr. Stokes’ model is currently the best for describing how people recognize spoken vowels. A distinct set of vowels characterizes each language. For example, English has ten vowels, Spanish five. Each vowel of a language has a characteristic sound that underlies all dialects and individual pronunciations. That characteristic sound can be visualized as spectrograms of three sound wave frequencies. Although unpatentable as is (patent applications 14/223304 and 13/241780 ), a computer program (Elbow) based on the model accurately predicts spoken vowels from observations of the spectrograms. A second program (Cobweb), especially useful to athletes, uses speech patterns to diagnose concussions in real time. The model c