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Morph your voice in Audacity Did you know that by applying certain effects to your voice in Audacity , you can sound dramatically different and take on a character of your own. To do this, first highlight your vocal track and then follow the instructions below to generate each effect: 1. If you'd like to sound like ... a robot Click on the Effect Menu and then Delay ... Change the Decay amount to 10 Change the Delay time to 0.009 Change the Number of echos to 30 Click OK Click on the Effect Menu again Click Repeat Delay Repeat this 5 times or more if necessary Listen to this example: Download Creating_a_robot_voice_in_Audacity.mp3 2. If you'd like to sound like ... a demonic spirit Click on the Edit Menu and then Duplicate Highlight the second track Click on the Effect Menu and then Change Pitch ... Change the Semitone (half-steps) to -1 Click OK Highlight the first track Click on the Edit Menu and then Duplicate Highlight the third track Click on the Effect Menu and then Change Pitch ... Change the Semitone (half-steps) to -5 Click OK Click on the Effect Menu and then Bass Boost ... Click OK Drag the Gain slide on the left of the third track to +3DB Highlight the second track Click on the Effect Menu and then Echo ... Change the Delay time (seconds) to 0.1 Change the Decay factor to 0.6 Click OK Listen to this example: Download Creating_a_demonic_voice_in_Audacity.mp3 3. If you'd like to sound like ... a chipmunk Click on the Effect Menu and then Change Pitch ... Change the Percent Change to 100 Click OK Listen to this example: Download Creating_a_chipmunk_voice_in_Audacity.mp3 4. If you'd like to sound like ... a telephone operator Click o

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Language in humans has evolved culturally rather than genetically, according to a study by UCL (University College London) and US researchers. By modelling the ways in which genes for language might have evolved alongside language itself, the study showed that genetic adaptation to language would be highly unlikely, as cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes. Thus, the biological machinery upon which human language is built appears to predate the emergence of language. According to a phenomenon known as the Baldwin effect, characteristics that are learned or developed over a lifespan may become gradually encoded in the genome over many generations, because organisms with a stronger predisposition to acquire a trait have a selective advantage. Over generations, the amount of environmental exposure required to develop the trait decreases, and eventually no environmental exposure may be needed - the trait is genetically encoded. An example of the Baldwin effect is the development of calluses on the keels and sterna of ostriches. The calluses may initially have developed in response to abrasion where the keel and sterna touch the ground during sitting. Natural selection then favored individuals that could develop calluses more rapidly, until callus development became triggered within the embryo and could occur without environmental stimulation. The PNAS paper explored circumstances under which a similar evolutionary mechanism could genetically assimilate properties of language - a theory that has been widely favoured by those arguing for the existence of 'language genes'. The study modelled ways in which genes encoding language-specific properties could have coevolved with language itself. The key finding was that genes for language could have coevolved only in a highly stable linguistic environment; a rapidly changing linguistic environment would not provide a stable target for natural selection. Thus, a biological endowment could not coevolve with p

"However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me. To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful-and the technology will continue to improve with time. In addition to automatic captions, we're also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we'll use Google's ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don't have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks."

"Writing is vital to most examples of learning. It is how civilisation conveys information from generation to generation, it is how parents often communicate their needs and fears for their children as notes to the teacher, and it is how little Johnny/Jane tells you about what their cat and/or dog did at the weekend. Some people love writing, while others struggle with it, but everyone has to write to some degree in their daily lives, and all of this stems from their experiences in the classroom."

Advice for language learners General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you. Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak. It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to break out of this paradox? At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So create exposure. * Read books in the target language. * Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.) * Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things. * Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it. * Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself. * Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it. * Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends. * Seek out opportunities to work using the language. * Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language. * Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language. * Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.) Taking a class can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too eas

...The CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) has developed two such tools, version 1.0 and 2.01 of the Media Access Generator (MAGpie), for creating captions and audio descriptions for rich media. ...

Great tool for generating memes and captioning photos.

Various interesting articles related to SM and FLL. On the attractiveness of social media for language learning: a look at the state of the art  Facebook-ing and the Social Generation: A New Era of Language Learning  Language Learners' "Willingness to Communicate" through Livemocha.com Online gaming as sociable media

"Tom Lehrer CHEMISTRY element song follow me in twitter @iamdonhey CHEMISTRY element song (Original YouTube description) Tune: "The Song of the Major-General" in Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance""

English subtitles completed. The subtitling page is among those of the http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning team, which all can join freely: a nice meeting place for language teachers who use songs.

These are excellent resources to use for assessing language programs and teaching in general!

Extends definition of communicative from interactive, purposeful, reciprocal, negotiated, generally synchronous, unpredictable, and heterogenous, to include interpersonal and broader contextual contingency as well as personal commitment to or investment in achieving desirable outcomes.

NewFiction brings you new generation audio books. Here you can freely subscribe to a variety of cool iSoaps (new type of audio books similar to old-time serial radio dramas) and listen to them online. The site takes original stories and dramatizes them with voices of dedicated actors and actresses.

I've just discovered Wordle, which is a really useful site for creating word clouds. The word clouds are created by entering either a text, URL or del.icio.us username into a field. The site then generates a word cloud based on the frequency of key words in the text or webpage.

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52-Year old man from California finally reveals methods he uses to make the electric company pay... His step-by-step methods can be used by anyone who wants to generate his own electricity..."

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