“These days, a chicken leg is a rare dish” might sound like an odd thing to observe, but during World War II, it was among dozens of phonetically balanced sentences devised by researchers for testing cockpit transmissions and headphones in planes. The sentences use a wide variety of sounds, which is why they’re still useful for testing audio today. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Phonetically Balanced Sentences”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks.
Glue the sheet to the dark blue background.
It’s easy to tell the depth of a well.
These days, a chicken leg is a rare dish.
I got the coded message, I will deliver the package to the bridge in Berlin.
Right? That’s what you told me, right?
Sure.
Put it on my fedora and my trench coat and in the fog.
We’ll do the exchange.
Actually, I think you know what I’m really talking about.
That’s cool.
These are test sentences devised by researchers at Harvard in World War II to test communications devices like microphones and headphones and cockpit transmissions, that kind of thing.
And the challenge for them was to come up with phrases that made sense, sentences that made sense, but that also sort of reflected the whole gamut of the sounds that we make when we talk.
And so these sentences, interestingly enough, have been used since then.
They’re used today by cell phone companies, the sort of can you hear me now kind of test.
And it’s really fascinating to me, partly because I think they’ve got this odd poetry to them.
Is it because they’re short words and they tend to be very Anglo-Saxon and the bluntness of the end syllables, like T on the end of a word, is an important thing to check when you’re checking audio quality?
Yes, exactly.
I’m not sure why, but all of these sentences are composed of words that only have one syllable except for one of the words, which has two.
So, for example, you have,
A rod is used to catch pink salmon.
The source of the huge river is a clear spring.
Help the woman get back to her feet.
Oh, nice.
Isn’t that something?
A pot of tea helps to pass the evening.
And so having these sentences that you use across devices and across tests means that you are comparing apples to apples.
So you’ve got cell phone A from the 90s and cell phone B from the 2000s and then the one from the 2010s.
And then you really know what you’re talking about when you compare their quality or their waveform, the output, that sort of thing, right?
Exactly, yes.
And you can find lots of them.
There are dozens of them, and you can find them online.
They’re really quite beautiful, I think.
Yeah, and so we’re going far beyond the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.
Right.
It’s not just the letters, it’s the phonemes.
Exactly.
I mean, it reminds me of the language that you use to indicate letters, you know, alpha, bravo, Charlie.
And we’re getting close to what people who are public speakers do when they rewrite scripts so that they can be understood in big stadiums versus, say, in front of a brick wall, in front of 50 people in a comedy shop, right?
Talk about that.
Well, the same material that works in an intimate environment doesn’t work in a stadium because you have to take into account echoes, the fact that some parts of your language won’t be reproduced.
Like maybe the high-pitched stuff will be missing and the plosives will be suppressed and some of the fricatives will disappear.
You just got to take that into account.
Interesting.
Yeah, we have the same experience switching from print journalism to radio as well.
If you’re writing a radio script, it’s really quite different.
Much shorter sentences and much more simple language.
I heard Alex Bloomberg talk about this on a podcast.
And this is the guy who does Planet Money.
He’s from This American Life.
He did the startup podcast about starting up his company.
And he talked about how when you look at his scripts
Or even Ira Glass’s scripts,
You don’t actually see what looks like normal prose.
It looks almost like staccato,
Like a badly transmitted telegram.
It looks almost like a censored document with a lot of words taken out because that’s what sounds natural, even if it doesn’t look natural.
-huh. Yeah, when you’re talking, you fill in those lacunae.
Ooh, nice. Very good.
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