On Mar 3 2005, 22:16, Richard A. Cini wrote:
I had an idea for an Easter Egg within the Altair32
Emulator. I
remember a story that you could run a certain program on the Altair
and hold
an AM radio next to the Altair and you would hear
music. IIRC, the
song was
"Daisy" as was played in 2001: A Space
Odyssey.
Does anyone (1) have this program in source and/or binary and
(2)
can someone make a high-quality WAV file of it for me
(since I don't
have an
Altair)?
Sounds (sorry) like a good idea. The inspiration for HAL singing
"Daisy" when he was lobotomised by Dave Bowman in "2001" was that
Bell
Labs had demonstrated an IBM 7094 "singing" "Daisy" in 1961. Bell
Labs
were doing research into vocal-tract modelling; John Kelly had wired a
speaker to one of the output bits and he and Carol Lochbaum[1]
programmed the vocal, with Max Mathews, who was pioneering digital
music, did the accompaniment. The whole thing was programmed onto
magtape, read back once complete and "played" through the speaker. The
recording they made was also once available on an album called "Music
from Mathematics".
I'm sure there used to be an article on the web about it, though I
can't seem to find it right now, though I have found references to some
of the Bell Labs reports and tapes:
http://www.mindspring.com/~ssshp/ssshp_cd/ss_btl1.htm (about 2/3 down).
What I can find, though, is a digitised copy of the recording they
made, which I downloaded, so I've put it on my website for you:
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/daisy.aifc
I also have an MP3 version, which isn't much inferior (and much
smaller!):
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/daisy.mp3
There's an updated, unaccompanied, somewhat shorter, version from later
work (text-to-speech project) at Bell Labs:
www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/languages.html
www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/daisy.aiff
[1] sometimes mispelt "Lockbaum"
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York