Cepstrum, quefrency, liftering

[Geoffrey Steven Nathan]

These are old terms. I learned them in the (nineteen) seventies. There was even a time when I knew what they meant--they are some kind of mathematical transformation of a spectrum (I think cepstrum meant fourier analysis of the curve represented by, say, a formant). I forget what quefrency and lifters are. But they have a legitimate meaning in very hairy acoustic analyses, way beyond what we learned in Acoustic Phonetics when I was a graduate student. They are used in some automatic speech recognition stuff, I think.

Geoff

Nobody at Wayne State will EVER ask you for your password. Never send it to anyone in an email, no matter how authentic the email looks.

----- Original Message -----

> From: "W Brewer" <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM>
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Sent: Monday, March 17, 2014 5:35:21 PM
> Subject: Cepstrum, quefrency, liftering

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Cepstrum, quefrency, liftering
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> WB: In my never-ending, hopeless struggle to conquer audio software,
> I
> came up against these terms: <cepstrum> (< spectrum), <quefrency> (<
> frequency), <liftering> (<filtering). Has you guys got a handle on
> this
> stuff yet? Looks like semi-palindromic neologism. As if Mr Scott had
> a
> transporter malfunction and the words came out half-bassackwards.
> Poor
> creatures. *Half-bassackwardism?

> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org