Abstract: A method used by a controller (112) and a communication receiver (122) for performing a time-scale modification of a signal comprised of an input stream of signal representations to form an output stream of signal representations. An output block of S.sub.o signal representations is selected from the output stream for use in overlapping signal representations from the output block with S.sub.o contiguous signal representations of the input stream, the S.sub.o contiguous signal representations beginning with a predetermined signal representation. The overlapping process includes determining (406) a maximum similarity measure between selected portions of the input and the output streams, applying (410) a weighting function to each, and summing the results of each. The overlapping process further includes replacing (412) a selected portion of the output stream with the latter summation, and selecting (414) a new set of samples from the input stream to append to the output stream.