Peter Shann Ford’s analysis of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing speech
On October 3, 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald published that Peter Shann Ford,
“An Australian researcher using high-tech software has found the tiny missing article in Neil Armstrong’s declaration as he became the first human to step onto the moon’s surface.”. He discovered the signal evidence of the utterence of the word “a” in Armstrong’s historic phrase “one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind”.
Going to the source, a page on Peter’s Control Bionics company website links to a PDF describing the analysis process he used.
Here is a quick summary of my main points regarding Peter Shann Ford’s analysis of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing speech.
- There are more appropriate tools than Goldwave software, for example, Matlab, Praat (which is free, seen in David Beaver’s analysis), or some other software. Perhaps a spectrogram (commonly used by speech researchers) could have helped the analysis.
- The original NASA audio download Peter linked to is 11.025kHz, 8 bit quality - not highly detailed, and some unknown number of generations removed from the primary sources (which are reportedly lost - read a report on the matter here).
- I think Peter’s claim (in his PDF) that the noise removal process does not change critical voice characteristics is questionable.
- The “control phrase” (”for man[kind]“) has a gap between words that is so similar in time to the test phrase (”for (a) man”), that they are unlikely to indicate different utterences. Speech researchers have mentioned it is likely that the sound between “for” and “man” is what is known as “creak” - an involuntary sound occurring between particular sounds of speech. There is more information about these features on the Language Log website linked from below.
- Peter’s research was not peer reviewed by speech researchers, but by an astronaut and “Ms. Rano Singh, a Physiotherapist with a Masters in Biomechanics”.
- Language Log notes that the mouth diagram in Peter Shann Ford’s analysis is “from a description of Korean alveolars, and Korean does not have the American English approximant /r/.”
There are some further arguments on Language Log website:
First Korean on the Moon!
Armstrong’s abbreviated article: the smoking gun?
One small step backwards.