Dissecting Voices to Find the Hidden Call For Help

Note to Self

WNYC Studios

Self-improvement, Tech, Note, Npr, Education, Public, Wnyc, Manoush, York, To, New, Self, Radio, Business, Technology, Relationships, City, Society & Culture, Zomorodi, Newtechcity

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2014

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amber Smith's voice is a symptom of illness and an alarm for looming danger, even if she doesn't always hear it herself.

Amber has bipolar disorder and her mood swings are a risk: high highs can lead to massive spending sprees and low lows have dipped into suicidal territory. She's managing it now with medication. She's also testing out a new technology to try to catch a mood swing before it starts by using her cell phone to analyze the acoustics of her voice. Tiny variations in how she speaks, or you speak, can be clues to shifting mental states.

"Speech is incredibly rich it encodes so much of our behavior, it encodes information about gender, about our age, about our identity, and in this case about mood," explains computer engineering professor Emily Mower Provost of the University of Michigan. She and her colleague psychiatrist Melvin McInnis are testing out how to plumb the hidden signals and codes of a human voice to enable early action and better care for people with mental health issues.

It gets touching, it gets ambitious, and it's all pretty hopeful. Have a listen.

This is Part 1 of a two part series on voices and how computers and new technology can hear hidden meaning in how we speak. Next week: how this is being used to make products and profits. Subscribe to New Tech City here to make sure you don't miss it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friend, this is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City.
0:06.9	Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy.
0:10.0	I can't believe that you said that.
0:12.5	I can't believe you said that.
0:13.5	I can't believe you said that.
0:14.5	I can't believe you said that.
0:16.5	I cannot believe you said that.
0:18.5	It's pretty obvious how I feel depending on how I say it, right?
0:23.5	Faster, higher pitch, louder, or longer pauses between the words.
0:32.5	You can listen to someone and pretty quickly calculate their intention, their emotions, their mood.
0:39.5	I would talk fast enough that people would have to be like, whoa, slow down.
0:43.5	I would jump from subject to subject.
0:45.5	For Amber Smith, her voice is a symptom, an indicator of an illness.
0:50.5	Amber is bipolar, and when she's high or up, as she calls it, people who know her well, they can hear it in her voice, especially her boyfriend.
0:59.0	He says, okay, I'm having trouble following you. Can you take a deep breath?
1:04.0	But usually by then, Amber's mania has started to kick in.
1:08.5	And sometimes it can feel pretty good.
1:11.0	A lot of people like the highs, and the highs can be good.
1:15.5	It can also be kind of nice to have a lot of energy and to get a big project underway.
1:20.5	Bipolar disorder is also sometimes called manic depression.
1:24.5	And in Amber's case, she's kind of lucky.
1:26.5	Her mania doesn't turn into a psychosis.
	...

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