[CW] Re: ?"Morse Therapy"

[D. Chester]

> From: "David Ring" <n1ea at arrl.net>

> K4KYV brings up an excellent point perhaps accidentally.  How many
> people these days have poor comprehension of spoken conversation?
> They do what the current acceptable thinking in Morse code reception
> is:  They fill in the blanks with what they believe to be the meaning.
>
> While art may be a pleasurable experience where the receiver may
> determine the meaning, communications on the other hand is the
> accurate transmission of meaning from the sender to the receiver.
> Otherwise it is art.
>
> In Morse as well as other communication, we first must accurately
> perceive the content, then we must interpret it so that we can
> understand it.  Without accurate listening we are doomed to never
> understand - except by happy guesses - the intent of the sender of the
> communications.

This is closer to reality than most of us are aware.  In listening to spoken 
language, we are unaware of many of the holes in the "text" that we fill in 
unconsciously.  This is crearly evident with the traditional "communications 
quality" audio used with the land line telephone and much of our amateur 
radio voice communication.  A lot of informational cues are missed when the 
frequency response is limited to 300-3000 Hz; IIRC, experimentation (at Bell 
Labs?) determined that so limiting the bandwidth results in something like 
15% of the intelligence information lost, mainly due to the loss of 
articulation that results in missed consonant sounds.  We are normally 
unaware of it because our brain subconsciously fills in the missing 
information.  But why else would phone operators have to resort to phonetics 
so often?

I recall a personal experience when I was living in France decades ago.  A 
girl I knew was an adamant fan of George Harrison.  She had one particular 
45 r.p.m. single of a  song titled "Deep Brue".  She was studying English, 
but her comprehension of the language was imperfect at best, so she asked me 
to listen to the record and transcribe the lyrics for her.  I thought it 
would be very easy, since when casually  listening to the song, I always 
thought I understood every word.  But when I started to actually write down 
the words to the lyrics, I was surprised at how many words were totally 
uncomprehensible because he slurred his voice while singing, or his voice 
was drowned out by the accompanying instruments.  I was able to fill in most 
of the missing words by guessing, but there were several  gaps that I had to 
leave blank.

>From time to time,  I do try to practise copying Morse by writing it down on 
paper, and I find 5-character cypher groups easier to accurately copy than 
real words, because I tend to anticipate letters when copying meaningful 
text, and sometimes I anticipate wrongly.  I  suppose that's the real point 
in copying behind, but I have always found writing one thing while copying 
something else in code, to be distracting.  I suppose it takes practice, but 
I have never spent that much time at it, because 100% perfect hard copy of 
Morse code is not a skill that would be particularly useful to me, given 
that 99% of my cw receiving is routine CW ragchews over the air.  Sometimes 
I do copy some of the text when copying something like a detailed 
description of someone's homebrew  rig.  I suspect that many high speed CW 
contest operators have developed skill at accurately copying callsigns and 
other items in the typical contest exchange, but would have great difficulty 
accurately copying several paragraphs of unfamiliar English text.  The same 
goes for ragchew CW QSO's since much of the exchange is "rubber stamp" 
information: QTH, OP, RIG, TX, RX, RST, 73, CUL, etc. When copying text by 
hand, I usually abbreviate many of the words, as for example leaving out 
certain vowels or other letters.

>
> In message traffic - this can be according to the seriousness of the
> traffic - very very important.  The professional communicator has
> rightly prided himself on relaying communications without changing it.
> Guessing might change it and will change it as guessing continues.

That's where the skill of 100% hard copy is essential.  The same was true 
with the old land line telegraphers of years past.  And the same is still 
true with voice messages. The intelligence services that monitor military 
communications make recordings of the messages, then re-play them for 
analysis.

Don k4kyv


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