4 Mar
2005
4 Mar
'05
8:56 a.m.
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Pete Turnbull wrote:
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
http://vortex.com/rmf/daisy.ram
(Requires RealPlayer)
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".
Never heard of that one! But it's also available on a 45 called "Computer
Speech: He Saw the Cat" produced by Bell Telephone Laboratories. Copies
of that are not terribly uncommon. I have the album and John Lawson
(thanks!) transcribed a copy to CD for me.
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
Always good to have mirrors :) The link above has been there for years.
I also have an MP3 version, which isn't much
inferior (and much
smaller!):
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/daisy.mp3
Ooh, an MP3 version :)
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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