Citation Michele Covell, Margaret Withgott, and Malcolm Slaney, "Mach1: Nonuniform Time-Scale Modification of Speech," Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Seattle, WA. May 12-15 1998. Abstract We propose a new approach to nonuniform time compression, called Mach1, designed to mimic the natural timing of fast speech. At identical overall compression rates, listener comprehension for Mach1-compressed speech increased between 5 and 31 percentage points over that for linearly compressed speech, and response times dropped by 15%. For rates between 2.5 and 4.2 times real time, there was no significant comprehension loss with increasing Mach1 compression rates. In A-B preference tests, Mach1-compressed speech was chosen 95% of the time. This paper describes the Mach1 technique and our listener-test results. Audio examples can be found on http://www.interval.com/papers/1997-061/. Downloadables mach1-icassp.pdf (74k) mach1-icassp.ps (310k)