Speed reading became very fashionable for a short time after President Kennedy’s prowess at the skill was revealed to the world, but most people, while able to master it, find it difficult to sustain it for long – but what about speed listening? Well we do it all the time – much television is artfully compressed, particularly the commercials and many interviews, where ums and pauses are edited out, but the famous Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute Technology is seeking to formalise the technique, and Technology Review reports that it is working on SpeechSkimmer, which, it is claimed, can run a tape or disk at twice the original speed and still preserve enough of the sound as to make it intelligible: the test sound is devlivered by microphone to the computer, which cuts and dices the sounds in such a way as to eliminate any pauses between words and compresses sound so as to deliver it in alternate bits to either right or left earphones of a headset the listener will wear – it’s said that while the listener will find the experience unsettling at first, the brain adjusts to the odd way of hearing.
