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People speak
almost as fast as possible. The
upper graphs are the signal and pitch contour from a maximum effort pitch
warble: the speaker was asked to warble as fast as possible. She managed to execute one cycle per
about 220 ms. The lower graph shows
(on the same time scale), normal Mandarin speech, at a conversational
speed. Here we see a pitch cycle in
400ms. This is quite normal: most
of the time, while speaking, we run our muscles at 50% or more of their
maximum speed. Since we’re pushing
the muscles and the attached neural control systems close to their limits,
the dynamics of the nerves and muscles will be important.
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