posted 10-04-2006 11:11 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by KC Stoever:
By the way, was I hallucinating last night, listening to Keith Olbermann's Countdown (tv was in the other room)? Didn't he have the "small step for a man" story at number one on his story countdown? I can't find mention of it in the provisional transcript of the show.

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But first, time now for COUNTDOWN's top three newsmakers of this day...

Number two, Neil Armstrong. Long have we been told that the first man on the moon said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"? But he was supposed to say, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Now an Australian audio analyst has cleaned up the tape of what Armstrong actually said, says Armstrong got it right, said., "That's one small step for a man." But the word was lost in the garbled transmission from the moon.

posted 10-04-2006 04:58 PM               

• One small step backwards
  
• One 75-millisecond step before a "man"
  
• Armstrong's abbreviated article: the smoking gun?
  
• Armstrong's abbreviated article: notes from the expert

posted 10-05-2006 02:57 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Rick:
I, for one, still don't believe Armstrong actually said "one small step for A man." The cadence of his sentence, to me, does not include any break for a missing word.

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posted 10-07-2006 06:21 PM            

Upon hearing in the news about the Peter Shann Ford analysis, I did my own evaluation of the NASA "One small step for (a) man" sound file, and determined that Mr. Ford's analysis does not support his conclusion.

Mr. Ford used $45 GoldWave software and only looked visually at the section in question, after applying noise filtering.

I utilized $400 Adobe Audition 2.0 audio production software (developed by Syntrillium Software, which company Adobe bought), and $700 Celemony Melodyne Studio 3.0 software to do my investigation, so I had somewhat better tools at my disposal.

In the questioned part of the audio file where the "a" is sought, there is a bit of noise, specifically three short noise spikes, and that may be misleading Mr. Ford. Mr. Ford does use noise filtering, but such filtering does not completely eliminate the noise spikes, due to their prominence. You can still see them.

I am providing some much clearer screen shots and audio samples which should demonstrate to the careful listener that no "a" is evident in the recording.

Here is the original recording as obtained from the NASA website.

Here is a version of that same recording after applying Adobe Audition noise filtering algorithms.

Here is the recording, with no noise filtering, slowed down to half the original speed, using Melodyne.

Here is the noise filtered version slowed down to half the original speed, using Melodyne.

Here is a version which uses Adobe Audition to slow down the "for man" phrase to one tenth of its original speed.

Note that in the 1/10th speed version above, Mr. Ford's "0.035 second" section would be magnified by a factor of ten, making it about a third of a second long (0.35 seconds). This would satisfy Mr. Ford's anecdotal comment that the original was "10 times too fast for the 'a' to be audible." I think that the attentive listener will discern that the "m" is already closed during that time.

Supporting screen shots are consolidated into one PDF file.

The first picture shows the spectrogram of the original NASA recording, including background hum and noise. The three noise spikes mentioned previously can be seen.

The second picture shows the filtered version, with the three noise spikes still visible.

The third picture shows the audio wave file with the "for man" segment stretched to 10 times its length.

The fourth picture shows the filtered version as Melodyne depicts it on a "piano roll." The vertical axis represents notes on the piano ("C3" is the "C" one octave below middle "C") the blue "blobs" are the wave file, and the thin blue line represents the musical pitch of his voice. Note that in the segment in question, where the noise is, the pitch cannot be followed by the pitch detection algorithm of Melodyne.

posted 10-12-2006 09:17 PM            

For convenience, I have extracted the first page text:

An analysis and rebuttal to Peter Shann Ford's conclusion about what Neil Armstrong said
Garth D. Wiebe, October 12, 2006

Here is what Peter Shann Ford did.

He made the claim that the "a" was present in "One small step for (a) man" based on the following methodology:

He used a simple, low cost audio wave editor (GoldWave v5.14) to examine the audio waveform.

First he used the editor to select the background noise in the waveform where Neil Armstrong was not speaking.

Then he used the editor's capability to filter the whole waveform based on that selected noise profile.

Then he zoomed in on the area in question and noticed that there was still something there. He assumed that this was the missing "a" sound.

What he saw was only the noise that existed there in the first place, although somewhat reduced by the noise filtering.

He said that the "a" sound was too quick to be humanly perceived, as it was "0.035 seconds" long.

Here is what I did:

I likewise created a filtered version of the original recording, in the same way that he did.

• Original (from NASA website)
  
• Filtered

I used a more advanced audio editor (Adobe Audition 2.0) to create a two-dimensional, color-graded frequency plot, called a "spectrogram" of both the filtered and unfiltered versions. In it you can separately see the hum (straight continuous lines), crackly noise (vertical intrusions), and his voice (long wavy lines consisting of his fundamental pitch plus harmonic overtones above it. (See page 2.)

I used a second, very state of the art utility (Celemony Melodyne 3.0) to plot his fundamental vocal pitch on a "note by note" basis on what is called a "piano roll." One can flip back and forth between the piano roll and the spectrogram and correlate them. Melodyne is not able to discern a voiced vowel pitch ("a") during the spot in question, because it detects only noise there. (See page 3.)

I showed that the noise was still there in the filtered version, of sufficient magnitude to mislead someone looking at just the waveform into thinking that the desired object was there. (See page 4.)

On page 2, I show exactly where the "a" is still missing in the spectrogram. You can see this clearly in the spectrogram, whereas a simple waveform cannot reveal it. I circled that place where the "a" should appear as a fundamental tone of his voice, beneath the noise, if it was there.

I used the aforementioned advanced audio editor to slow down the section in question by a factor of ten, so that Mr. Ford's "0.035 second" section is now 0.35 seconds long. This alleviates Mr. Ford's contention that "0.035 seconds" is too quick to be humanly discerned.

Listening to the slowed down version, one can hear that the "a" still cannot be discerned, and that the sound progresses evenly from the "r" sound to the "m" sound with nothing in between.

• Slow filtered version
  
• Slow unfiltered version

posted 06-02-2013 07:29 AM               

When Neil Armstrong took his first step on the Moon, he claimed he said, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” – but many listeners think he left out the “a.” A team of speech scientists and psychologists from Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing and The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus is taking a novel approach to deciphering Armstrong’s quote by studying how speakers from his native central Ohio pronounce “for” and “for a.” Their results suggest that it is entirely possible that Armstrong said what he claimed, though evidence indicates that people are statistically more likely to hear “for man” instead of “for a man” on the recording. The team will present its work at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013), held June 2-7 in Montreal.

posted 06-02-2013 12:27 PM            

I put this forward by way of example, not to generate a debate about the Gettysburg Address!

On a personal note, when taking video on holiday in unusual and dramatic places (for example Greenland) I always do a little speech to camera to provide context. Sometimes I leave out a significant word, without realising at the time. It happens.

posted 06-02-2013 04:09 PM               

Theoretically, it seems like such circuits (and their potential for audio clipping) could be found almost anywhere in the chain from microphone interface to RF radio(s).

Finally poked around and found this 2006 update to the Honeysuckle Creek website (bottom of page).

The page appears to confirm the use of VOX, and raises the notion of its potential to drop fragments in the communications, but doesn't reference squelch effects.

Importantly the writeup also leaves open the question of whether time was even available to 'fit in the A'. Perhaps the dialect study will help refine basic plausibility and how much time is 'enough'.

posted 06-02-2013 08:01 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by NAAmodel#240:
Historians should report what was said and not what was heard.

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posted 06-03-2013 03:50 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by David C:
So either he made exactly the same mistake, or it's just his style of speech. The latter I think.

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posted 06-03-2013 08:14 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by David C:
They persuaded him to repeat his famous words, and blow me if it didn't sound exactly the same.

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Armstrong seems caught off guard, but when he says it you can definitely pick up the dialect and how it might have been missed.

posted 06-03-2013 01:35 PM               

I note that the piece on the home page posted by Robert says "...entirely possible". This leaves a whole area of doubt and is a million miles away from being absolutely certain that Armstrong in fact did say "a man".

posted 06-03-2013 02:02 PM               

"We've bolstered Neil Armstrong's side of the story," [Laura Dilley, an assistant professor in Michigan State University's department of communicative sciences and disorders] said. "We feel we've partially vindicated him. But we will most likely never know for sure exactly what he said based on the acoustic information."

posted 06-03-2013 05:01 PM               

Do I think people from Nu Yohk, Cahlaforynyah and Warshingtun speak funny? Yep. Being from the South, I prob'ly sound funny to anyone from those places too. As for Armstrong's 'a', I hear it. That's the way we talk 'round here too. "Is that yellow?" turns into "Zat yella?". "Did you know that?" turns into "Juno that?". Many Southerners run words together and also hardly ever use that 'g' on the end of a word. Other dialects have their own differences, and it seems that from listening to Armstrong repeat his famous words again on the above video that he also certainly ran some words together. When I say those famous words, I run the "for" and the "a" together too, but when I write it, I write it as "for a". That's because I'm saying "uh" and not "aay".

Now think about this - what if Armstrong had instead said, "That's one small step for an American." How many people would have sworn he said, "That's one small step, foreign American"?

posted 06-04-2013 05:35 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by 328KF:
I think I have posted the link to this before, but here it is.

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posted 06-04-2013 12:46 PM               

My point is: they may be making too much of this suppposed slurring due to regional accents.

posted 07-26-2013 08:03 PM               

Linguists understand that the physiology of the human tongue, teeth, lips and mouth structures works in ways not completely understood. The very fact that accents, intonations, pitches, etc., exist in the human voice at all, demonstrates that no two human beings are likely to have EXACTLY the same voice. No one knows what Lincoln or Washington sounded like and that is impossible TO know for those men who lived before the technology of sound recording. Generalizations or descriptions can't come close to the subjective nature of our perception in some of the senses.

Can you exactly describe a smell by any means other than comparing it to a known quantity of some other smell? Or maybe some people smell roses one way, and some in a totally different way. How could we ever know that? There is a particular industrial odor remover that I can smell for DAYS after even being exposed the slightest bit to it, and that smell induces anxiety and depression for me, that others who know me can't understand.

My point is... no two human beings will ever say that phrase in exactly the same way. But speech physiology is such that the transition from "for" to "man" involves an infinitesimal roll of the tongue and a lip motion that could easily slur a vowel to unintelligibility. An Ohio native who is immersed in Midwestern dialect could easily have said "a" in such a way that it is impossible to pick it out of the transition.

I personally believe it's there, but it blends in too seamlessly to be detectable. It is lost in the guttural transition from the ending "r" to the "m". It is virtually impossible to keep from making that almost instantaneous, almost subliminal guttural "uh" between those 2 consonants... and that is what "a" sounds like in non-enunciated speech.

posted 10-03-2013 10:03 PM            

Neil: "Rog. OK, the landing will be on runway three-five south lake and will be [a] straight-in approach and I'm at 32'000, going to use some brakes to make it. OK, I'm about... approaching... pretty hard to tell from here."

posted 10-03-2013 10:55 PM               

And as always: we all know what he meant. That is the significance of the words.

Still, I wish he had followed the advice of an unknown astronaut:

posted 10-04-2013 01:14 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by 328KF:
Armstrong seems caught off guard, but when he says it you can definitely pick up the dialect and how it might have been missed.

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