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Scientists have long known that people can understand speech at a rate of up to 400 words a minute and beyond. "Speech rate isn't limited by the listener," said Arthur Wingfield, a psychology professor at Brandeis University. "It's limited by the speaker."

In normal conversation, only a small part of the brain is taxed, leaving excess processing power to be used for listening for lurking predators, filtering out background noise or simply daydreaming.

But speeding up speech on analog equipment like cassette decks traditionally led to the dreaded chipmunk effect, making long-term listening untenable. Digital time compression, however, works by discarding tiny segments of repetitive audio (for example, 30 milliseconds of a vowel) and reconnecting the remaining bits, leaving the pitch unaltered.

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