Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
Speaker 3: and today we're going to be talking about some early
Speaker 3: voice synthesis machines. Rob I actually got interested in this
Speaker 3: topic because last week, when we were watching the Weird
Speaker 3: House Cinema movie The Black Hole, I was thinking about
Speaker 3: Roddy McDowell's voice when he's doing a voice for the
Speaker 3: robot character who shares a lot of proverbs with the
Speaker 3: human characters. And I kept listening to his line delivery
Speaker 3: and I couldn't decide if he was trying to do
Speaker 3: quote robot voice or not. He seemed to kind of
Speaker 3: dip in and out of it. You know what I
Speaker 3: mean When I say robot voice, where a character's playing
Speaker 3: a robot and they say things like this, Well.
Speaker 2: Of course I know what you are talking about, Joe.
Speaker 3: I got kind of interested in the history of robot voice.
Speaker 3: I was like, where does that come from? And I
Speaker 3: was digging around a little. I'm sure there is a
Speaker 3: good answer on that, but I don't know. My short
Speaker 3: search didn't really turn up anything interesting, but it did
Speaker 3: lead me indirectly to what we're talking about today, which is,
Speaker 3: of course, we have the voice synthesis systems that are
Speaker 3: largely digital today. Before that you had a lot of
Speaker 3: electrical and electro mechanical systems for synthesizing human voices. But
Speaker 3: actually there is an even earlier generation, which are the
Speaker 3: purely mechanical voice synthesizers before electricity even came into the picture.
Speaker 3: And that is what really stole my heart, especially one
Speaker 3: particular machine of this type that I'm going to talk
Speaker 3: about in the second half of this episode.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, this is a fascinating topic, in part
Speaker 2: because look at it. Look at where we are now, right,
Speaker 2: it's easy today in our Internet age for just the
Speaker 2: average Internet user to engage with their as chat bots
Speaker 2: and generative AI, text to speech and so forth. And
Speaker 2: you know, so we're able to interact with an artifact,
Speaker 2: a thing that reflects human will, that has been designed
Speaker 2: to do key and telling things that have long been
Speaker 2: the hallmarks of human activity, artistic generation, creative writing and
Speaker 2: conversation or especially speech. And of course it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's easy nowadays to do that, right, to transform into
Speaker 2: audible or even video content. What is either written by
Speaker 2: human or or created with some sort of a chat
Speaker 2: bot machine, and the results may be amusing, that may
Speaker 2: may be disastrous. But we're in this age where the
Speaker 2: idea of the machine speaking is not in and of
Speaker 2: itself groundbreaking, or at least if it is groundbreaking, or
Speaker 2: if it's amazing, it's it's that it's a lower level
Speaker 2: of amazement compared to previous ages.
Speaker 3: Well, as you say, it's very integrated into modern technology.
Speaker 3: So there's you know, Series and Alexa, all these like
Speaker 3: home devices that speak, GPS devices for the car, you know,
Speaker 3: that speak to you, but almost all of them are
Speaker 3: still the subject of amusement if you actually pay attention
Speaker 3: to what the voice sounds like, you know, like reading
Speaker 3: emotions into the voice that's telling you what to do
Speaker 3: as you're driving. That always makes me laugh because it
Speaker 3: always seems a little bit annoyed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, what's Series whole deal that sort of thing, right?
Speaker 2: You know. The other interesting angle on all this is
Speaker 2: that are modern technological advancements here, or even some of
Speaker 2: the historic technological advancements like they are kind of the
Speaker 2: echo of a more ancient longing for this sort of thing.
Speaker 2: It connects to something that's just fascinated us for a
Speaker 2: long time, the idea generally of non human entities engaging
Speaker 2: in speech, and you could you could do absolutely wild
Speaker 2: chasing down the various divisions of this right, the various myths, legends,
Speaker 2: and traditions concerning the speech of animals, plants, inorganic materials,
Speaker 2: supernatural entities. You know, voices seemingly internal but also external
Speaker 2: to our individual experience.
Speaker 3: Though I would say there is an interesting thing about
Speaker 3: machines or human or automata or human artifacts in general,
Speaker 3: when compared to imagining an animal speak or any other
Speaker 3: usually not speaking things starting to speak, which is, if
Speaker 3: you're talking about a machine that does it, that means
Speaker 3: somebody has to make that machine, and somebody has to
Speaker 3: work that machine. And it kind of reminds me of
Speaker 3: the idea of grammar in language. You know. The interesting
Speaker 3: thing about grammar is that when we use language, we
Speaker 3: all use grammar, so we have an intuitive grasp of
Speaker 3: the rules of grammar. But without serious study, people can't
Speaker 3: actually tell you what those rules are. And so, like
Speaker 3: you know, that had to be in a sense a
Speaker 3: science to back engineer the rules of grammar that we
Speaker 3: use intuitively to like make them systematic and you know,
Speaker 3: actually discover what those rules are the same thing could
Speaker 3: be said about the phonetic rules that produce the intelligible speech.
Speaker 3: We can all do it if we can speak, but
Speaker 3: we don't necessarily understand what the individual physical properties of
Speaker 3: a word are, and so we wouldn't necessarily know how
Speaker 3: to make that same word come out of a machine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are all these things that you have to
Speaker 2: deconstruct before you can attempt to reproduce it artificially. And
Speaker 2: we see that time and time again with in robotics,
Speaker 2: for example. You know, things that we take for granted
Speaker 2: concerning human movement, just about anything else you can imagine,
Speaker 2: it becomes so much more difficult to try and reproduce
Speaker 2: that you've got to understand what it actually is on
Speaker 2: an entirely new level. First.
Speaker 3: Now, I am to understand that before anybody actually made
Speaker 3: a machine that could approximate or synthesize a human voice
Speaker 3: and produce intelligible speech, people were thinking about this as
Speaker 3: a concept.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is not surprising, you know, this is uh,
Speaker 2: this is kind of the the the meat of science fiction.
Speaker 2: Right before we can do it, we dream of it.
Speaker 2: One way or another, no matter what our exact grasp
Speaker 2: of science happens to be. It always reminds me of
Speaker 2: that line in William Gibson's Neuromancer where the character has
Speaker 2: made a deal, a pact with a powerful ai and
Speaker 2: it's pointed out like, this is the sort of thing
Speaker 2: that in you know, centuries ago, people only dreamed of
Speaker 2: making a deal with a devil, and now we've made
Speaker 2: it possible through our ingenuity and invention. Congratulations, yeah, so
Speaker 2: so yeah. Narrowing down here into generally the realm of
Speaker 2: alleged human creations that through at least partial technology, but
Speaker 2: also sometimes wizardry and alchemy and other things that are
Speaker 2: kind of like you know, bunched in there together with
Speaker 2: with actual technology to create some sort of a device
Speaker 2: capable of speech. And then there are some also some
Speaker 2: related things that are tied in there as well, and
Speaker 2: a lot of it comes down to the idea of
Speaker 2: a head, an artificial head that speaks.
Speaker 3: I found something so loaded and revealing about that. As
Speaker 3: a fact, the history of these machines, so many of
Speaker 3: them had, whether real or imagined, these machines, so many
Speaker 3: of them early on had heads or faces, so like
Speaker 3: it wouldn't just be a speaker like you would have today.
Speaker 3: That's you know, it's just a mechanical device for making
Speaker 3: the sound. It's like that the presence of a head
Speaker 3: or a face was considered important or at least desirable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I wondered to what extent part of it
Speaker 2: is just an echo of these earlier ideas. So going
Speaker 2: to run through a few of these here. One of
Speaker 2: the most famous, mainly from a literary tradition, as we'll
Speaker 2: discuss here, is the idea of the brazen head. And
Speaker 2: ultimately I guess there's more than one brazen head. We
Speaker 2: can say brazen heads artificial heads that could speak. There's
Speaker 2: a basically a lot of these stories concerned thirteenth century
Speaker 2: English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, who's come up
Speaker 2: on the show before, though this particular version of the
Speaker 2: story doesn't seem to emerge until the sixteenth century, and
Speaker 2: it does so within the works of contemporary drama.
Speaker 3: I think we talked about Roger Bacon at length in
Speaker 3: an episode we did about the invention of fireworks, which
Speaker 3: may come back and feature again in the feed soon.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I believe you're right, Yeah, I think Bacon
Speaker 2: did come up in that he had a reputation as
Speaker 2: not only a very learned man in both natural philosophy
Speaker 2: and theology, and I should drive home definitely existed. I
Speaker 2: don't think there's any doubt that there was a Roger Bacon.
Speaker 2: But then there are all these other stories that he
Speaker 2: was also potentially a wizard who was capable of producing
Speaker 2: fabulous automata, either through amazing feats of clockwork engineuity that
Speaker 2: I think would many would say was ultimately, you know,
Speaker 2: impossible during his time period, or failing that he was
Speaker 2: into alchemy and of course dark dank necromancy.
Speaker 3: I think the way I conceive of Roger Bacon is
Speaker 3: that he of course was a real figure. He was
Speaker 3: of great intellectual note and significance, but much about his
Speaker 3: sort of general reputation is kind of legendary, if that
Speaker 3: makes sense. I mean, there are many things we know
Speaker 3: about him that are true, but there's also just sort
Speaker 3: of an aura or a vibe about him that is
Speaker 3: not really based in reality.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, he becomes a character in literature, especially
Speaker 2: in these accounts, so you can sort of look at
Speaker 2: the different phases like historic individual ideas and you know,
Speaker 2: misunderstandings have said real life individual and then eventually that
Speaker 2: echoes into the fictional version of the person.
Speaker 3: Which that's the more like wizard version.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And so there are a few different examples
Speaker 2: of this. This is like a popular motif for a while.
Speaker 2: There's a sixteenth century prose romance titled the Famous History
Speaker 2: of Friar Bacon, and it tells of Bacon trying to
Speaker 2: give a replica of a human head speech and having
Speaker 2: to call in the devil for help. Cool. Other versions
Speaker 2: of this tale describe it as an artificial head given
Speaker 2: life by demons, which was capable of spontaneous speech and
Speaker 2: of course telling the future.
Speaker 3: I mean, what else would you tell?
Speaker 2: Right right? Robert Greene's sixteen thirty play Friar Bacon and
Speaker 2: Friar Bungay mentions this several times, citing quote Bacon's necromantic
Speaker 2: skill and heads of Brass that quote can utter any voice.
Speaker 2: The idea that's exploring both of these works is that
Speaker 2: Bacon wished to build a wall of brass around Britain
Speaker 2: with the help of the Brazen Head. He fails and
Speaker 2: the head explodes.
Speaker 3: Why have I never heard this? Site? It as like
Speaker 3: an early science fiction tale.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I'm probably not doing do diligence on
Speaker 2: exactly what happens and everything at It's like saying, well,
Speaker 2: in Star Wars, the bad guys make one planet to
Speaker 2: blow up another planet, and then the planet they may
Speaker 2: blows up. You know, That's that's really skipping over a
Speaker 2: lot of the nuance. And so I think there's there's
Speaker 2: inevitably more nuance here, but I just I didn't get
Speaker 2: into it. Okay, So this idea of the satanic brasshead
Speaker 2: of Roger Bacon persists despite the fact that there's no
Speaker 2: indication that anything like this even created purely through technology
Speaker 2: and not satanic wizardry was part of Bacon's world. He
Speaker 2: was interested in optics and certainly various instruments scientific instruments
Speaker 2: of brass of the day, but there's no indication that
Speaker 2: he ever built an artificial head and tried to get
Speaker 2: it to speak.
Speaker 3: Okay, so this is part of the wizard aura, not
Speaker 3: part of his biography.
Speaker 2: Right though, you know, we have to drive home to
Speaker 2: is it possible that Roger Bacon as a hobby did
Speaker 2: what he could to create you know, I mean, it's
Speaker 2: possible it's not, you know, I don't think he would
Speaker 2: have gotten to speak. But there are various sort of
Speaker 2: ways you could interpret this as having some basis in
Speaker 2: reality that doesn't involve magic or super science of the day. Okay, now,
Speaker 2: I went to my bookshelf and I pulled off my
Speaker 2: dusty copy of Brewers Dictionary Phrase and fable and provides
Speaker 2: a little more insight on the legend quote. It was
Speaker 2: said if Bacon heard it speak, he would succeed in
Speaker 2: his projects, if not, he would fail. His familiar Miles
Speaker 2: was set to watch, and while Bacon slept, the head
Speaker 2: spoke thrice. Time is half an hour later, it said
Speaker 2: time was in another half hour, it said times past
Speaker 2: fell down.
Speaker 3: And was broken to atoms to atoms to atoms. Yes,
Speaker 3: surely Adams means something different here, Adams right when discovered
Speaker 3: at the time, I think it just means like small
Speaker 3: parts or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, yeah, that.
Speaker 3: Would be hilarious if it was literally broken to atoms.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I don't know if it works, though. It
Speaker 2: sounds like it's kind of an alarm clock that explodes.
Speaker 3: Well, but I don't understand the difference between time was
Speaker 3: and time's passed. They're both past tens.
Speaker 2: Hmmm, that's a good point. Time is time was, Time's past.
Speaker 2: It seems like you would want the president there somewhere.
Speaker 2: But yeah, that's that's what it allegedly said. And you'll
Speaker 2: you'll find woodcuts that have this this motif on them
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: Like it would make more sense if it said the
Speaker 3: three things where time will be, time is, time was,
Speaker 3: but this seems more like time is, time was, time
Speaker 3: was was.
Speaker 2: Now. Brewers notes that reference to the references to the
Speaker 2: brazen head are just common in literature, appearing frequently in
Speaker 2: early romances but with Eastern origins, though it doesn't get
Speaker 2: into that a lot elsewhere in the volume. It's also
Speaker 2: noted that artificial heads that speak occur elsewhere as well.
Speaker 2: And some of these are brazen heads, and some of
Speaker 2: these are other things, but they're kind of I think
Speaker 2: it's important to run through brief some of these examples
Speaker 2: because they kind of paint a picture of not only
Speaker 2: some of these other ideas of artificial heads speaking and
Speaker 2: telling the future, but related non technological non artifacts that
Speaker 2: kind of help inform what we think technology can do. Okay, okay,
Speaker 2: so one of them is a brazen head in the
Speaker 2: possession of Pope Sylvester the Second in the tenth century,
Speaker 2: which he also constructed, and misinterpretations of its utterances could
Speaker 2: prove disastrous.
Speaker 3: Oh, is this also believed to be satanic in some way?
Speaker 2: I didn't go too deep on satanic implications, but possibly, I.
Speaker 3: Guess it would depend on if this legend is associated
Speaker 3: with pro Pope Sylvester or anti Pope Sylvester.
Speaker 2: Sources right, right, but you can definitely see that they're
Speaker 2: in the head itself, regardless of what's supposed to be
Speaker 2: powering it. Like this, it ties into two oracular traditions.
Speaker 2: You know, the idea that here is this thing that
Speaker 2: can give you you cryptic wisdom if you have the
Speaker 2: wisdom to decipher what it's telling you. Another example it's
Speaker 2: brought up in Brewers is or the Colossi of Memnon,
Speaker 2: which we did at least a whole I don't know.
Speaker 2: I can't remember as one episode or multiple episodes, but
Speaker 2: we discussed this on stuff to blow your mind. This
Speaker 2: is a fascinating topic in and of itself.
Speaker 3: This was basically, I think a statue or a pair
Speaker 3: of statues a part of sort of a ruins complex
Speaker 3: that was famous during in Roman Egypt as basically because
Speaker 3: it would make sounds, and there were different theories about
Speaker 3: how it made sounds and why.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it seems like I think some said it
Speaker 2: was capable of speech, but generally it's described as singing
Speaker 2: or some sort of a note. And as we discussed,
Speaker 2: while there are some I think unlikely theories regarding the
Speaker 2: use of some sort of intentional sound generating device or devices,
Speaker 2: it seems like a more likely explanation would have to
Speaker 2: do with peculiarities of the stone as it heated in
Speaker 2: the sun and then cooled at night. Anyway, go back
Speaker 2: and listen to that episode if you want to know
Speaker 2: about them. They have a pretty fascinating history.
Speaker 3: Will remember better in the original.
Speaker 2: Yes, there's the head of Orpheus at Lesbos, predicting the
Speaker 2: doom and death of Cyrus the Great. However, I believe
Speaker 2: this is generally thought to be the actual head of
Speaker 2: the hero Orpheus after he was torn apart by the
Speaker 2: main ads of Dionysus during a bacchanalia for the sin
Speaker 2: of worshiping Apollo or having worshiped Apollo. I'm not sure
Speaker 2: what the exact charge was, but still a prophetic disembodied
Speaker 2: head that still continues to speak. Brewers also mentions the
Speaker 2: head of Minos brought by Odin to Scandinavia, which I
Speaker 2: didn't know what to make of this, because Minos is,
Speaker 2: of course the mythical king of Crete, who we've discussed
Speaker 2: on the show before as well. I think the actual
Speaker 2: figure in reference here might be Nimir, the god of wisdom,
Speaker 2: that is beheaded in the Aservaniir War. Odin claims this
Speaker 2: head and it continues to speak secret wisdom. Again, this
Speaker 2: is another one that's not a mechanical head. It's the
Speaker 2: head of an actual defeated divine being that continues to
Speaker 2: live on and to speak. There are tales of Albertus
Speaker 2: Magnus having an earthen head which during the thirteenth century
Speaker 2: was said to speak and move until Thomas Aquinas breaks
Speaker 2: it by accident, and Magnus says, there goes the labor
Speaker 2: of thirty years because now it's broken. So I don't
Speaker 2: know what to make of that one either completely. But
Speaker 2: again we see this motif of a fabulous artificial head
Speaker 2: that speaks, that manages to break one way or another,
Speaker 2: either something fails, somebody knocks it over, or you know
Speaker 2: it explodes after you hit this neooze alarm twice. Then
Speaker 2: there's Alexander's statue of Ascalapius, the Greek god of medicine,
Speaker 2: that was said to speak, but Lucian wrote that the
Speaker 2: sounds came via a concealed man who spoke through tubes.
Speaker 2: So here's an example of some sort of of a creation.
Speaker 2: I guess it depends how you look. Either a statue
Speaker 2: that isn't intended to speak, or through supernatural machinations speaks,
Speaker 2: but according to Lucian, it's in neither of those. It's
Speaker 2: just tubes and some guy like hiding in the bushes
Speaker 2: speaking through the tubes, which is still clever and still technological,
Speaker 2: but is trickery.
Speaker 3: Nonetheless, I think the Lucian you're alluding to there is
Speaker 3: Luci of sam Masada, Is that right?
Speaker 2: I believe?
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, this is like this was an ancient satirist
Speaker 3: from Syria who is quite hilarious and was kind of
Speaker 3: a skeptic debunker of the of like the second century CE,
Speaker 3: which is sort of strange, but he was in that
Speaker 3: mold and he made like vicious mockery of people of
Speaker 3: all sorts and different philosophies and stuff, and also wrote
Speaker 3: a satire that some people have considered one of the
Speaker 3: earliest forms of science fiction.
Speaker 2: Now this also reminds me this is not I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess it memory service. Maybe it did speak. But
Speaker 2: there was of course the Man Face Serpent God glyicon
Speaker 2: of the second century that is often held up as
Speaker 2: being a hoax, like it was actually a puppet according
Speaker 2: to commentators. But I've always wondered what to make of that,
Speaker 2: because it kind of if someone is performing puppetry and
Speaker 2: people are having an emotional or even religious reaction to it,
Speaker 2: it kind of depends how it's presented. Right, are you
Speaker 2: presenting Glycan the man Face Serpent as like this is it?
Speaker 2: This is an actual man face serpent God. Come take
Speaker 2: a look that its life? Is proof that he is real?
Speaker 2: Or is it something else? Is it more like performance
Speaker 2: or is it more like reinterpretation? You know, because you
Speaker 2: have plenty of examples where people will carry out performances
Speaker 2: in which people dress as divine and semi divine figures.
Speaker 2: It's not supposed to be like, look at the proof here,
Speaker 2: here is this hero on the stage. This means God
Speaker 2: is real?
Speaker 3: Funny enough, I think Glicon was also written about by
Speaker 3: Lucian of Somesada. But the I guess the crucial question
Speaker 3: is like is there an attempt at trickery or not?
Speaker 3: Like do do you want the audience to believe there
Speaker 3: is not somebody behind the mask?
Speaker 2: Right? And you know that's interesting because that still kind
Speaker 2: of applies to a lot of what's going on in
Speaker 2: the world today with things like like chatbots and so forth.
Speaker 2: And you know this idea that if we you know,
Speaker 2: what is coming out of the box, what is coming
Speaker 2: out of the artificial head, and you know, we how
Speaker 2: are we interpreting it? And are we thinking there is
Speaker 2: something there that is not? So it's like on what
Speaker 2: level is there trickery? And then there is like interpretation
Speaker 2: of the trickery and so forth. But at any rate,
Speaker 2: I think, you know, some of these examples they proved
Speaker 2: that well before people could make any kind of a
Speaker 2: mechanical thing, be it ahead or not ahead, that could speak,
Speaker 2: we were still capable of dreaming about it. And I
Speaker 2: think there's ample evidence that long before anyone attempted to
Speaker 2: make a head that could talk through mechanical means, individuals
Speaker 2: sought and sometimes found a voice emerging from disembodied heads,
Speaker 2: either real ones, you know, the remains of human beings
Speaker 2: or other animals, or likenesses of human heads, either attached
Speaker 2: or detached from statues, and so forth. And I think
Speaker 2: there's room between trickery and belief, you know, for the
Speaker 2: suspension of belief and ritual as well to take into account.
Speaker 3: But of course later on people would end up building real,
Speaker 3: operable machines that were at least attempting to produce speech
Speaker 3: that could be understood by humans.
Speaker 2: That's right, And this is where we get more into
Speaker 2: the deconstruction of what human speech is, which in and
Speaker 2: of itself as a whole subject, but there are key
Speaker 2: moments where we see some major advancements being made here.
Speaker 2: So another major entry to discuss in all of this
Speaker 2: is the work of German born Russian doctor, physicist and
Speaker 2: engineer Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, who lives seventeen twenty three through
Speaker 2: seventeen ninety five. So he was a man of various interests,
Speaker 2: including the use of electricity and medicine, and at the
Speaker 2: Saint Petersburg Science Academy at one point offered a prize
Speaker 2: for advancements made in researching the mechanisms behind the vowels
Speaker 2: AEI own you in human speech. So in seventeen seventy
Speaker 2: nine he presented his vowel organ to the university. The
Speaker 2: vowel organ consisted of a series of resonators that produced
Speaker 2: vowel like sounds on a constant pitch when excited by
Speaker 2: a read. I found some illustrations of these basic resonators
Speaker 2: via the UCL Psychology and Language Sciences Department. Here I
Speaker 2: also found a website linked at this website where you
Speaker 2: can find instructions for how to make your own resonators
Speaker 2: out of plumbing supplies, which I found rather insightful. I
Speaker 2: did not attempt it, but if you're into plumbing supplies
Speaker 2: and vowel sounds, it seems like a natural craft choice.
Speaker 3: But the key insight being here that by changing the
Speaker 3: shape of a physical resonating cavity, you can change the
Speaker 3: sound of the vowel produced.
Speaker 2: Right right. Another take on this, I was reading the
Speaker 2: BBC Future article The Machines That Learned to Listen by
Speaker 2: Kadia Muskvich, and it describes these as resonance tubes connected
Speaker 2: to organ pipes. So you know, this is not to
Speaker 2: say that we had. This is not on this like
Speaker 2: the same level as some sort of imaginary brazen head
Speaker 2: that's going to speak of its own and spout out,
Speaker 2: spit out wisdom for you to interpret. This is a
Speaker 2: just figuring out how these vowel sounds are produced and
Speaker 2: reproducing them through a basic mechanical system. Mosfitch also points
Speaker 2: out a few other key individuals in the advancement of
Speaker 2: this technology. There's Wolfgang von Kimplin in Vienna, who created
Speaker 2: a similar acoustic mechanical speech machine about ten years after Kratzenstein.
Speaker 2: And then she also mentions English inventor Charles Wheatstone, who
Speaker 2: would improve on this in the early nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: Charles Wheatstone. I'm going to mention him again in a minute,
Speaker 3: but he's also notable because he was one of the
Speaker 3: inventors of the first commercially successful form of the telegraph.
Speaker 3: So we talked about him in our episode on You
Speaker 3: of the Telegraph. But when it comes to the one
Speaker 3: you mentioned before, that von Kempelan's machine, this is interesting
Speaker 3: because I read that while this machine was allegedly real,
Speaker 3: it was a real attempt to make a machine that
Speaker 3: would Von Kimpelan is now known for essentially being a hoaxer,
Speaker 3: because he tried to create other automata, including a chess
Speaker 3: playing automaton that was actually a hoax. It had a
Speaker 3: human inside it doing the move, so it was a
Speaker 3: fake robot.
Speaker 2: Though as a fake still really impressive. It's interesting where
Speaker 2: you get in, like what sometimes you're wondering you have
Speaker 2: to wonder what the line is between, you know, the
Speaker 2: actual technological innovation and trickery. I mean, obviously it's deception,
Speaker 2: and if you have a secret chamber in which there's
Speaker 2: a whole person doing stuff, you know, that's a real
Speaker 2: red flag there as well. But still the trickery is
Speaker 2: pretty ingenious too.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well yeah, I mean it takes skill to be
Speaker 3: a good magician.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, this brings us to the example that I was
Speaker 3: really excited to talk about in today's episode, which is
Speaker 3: the speaking machine of a nineteenth century inventor named Joseph
Speaker 3: fober So. One of my main sources here is just
Speaker 3: generally a good source on the history of speech synthesis
Speaker 3: and talking machines. It was a book chapter in the
Speaker 3: Rutledge Handbook of Phonetics from twenty nineteen by an author
Speaker 3: named Brad H. Story, who is part of the faculty
Speaker 3: of the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at
Speaker 3: the University of Arizona, and Story in this chapter traces
Speaker 3: the history of speech synthesis from the mechanical methods of
Speaker 3: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the digital techniques of
Speaker 3: the present. So it's the whole sort of modern arc
Speaker 3: of these machines. But the thing I really want to
Speaker 3: focus in on here now is this machine that I
Speaker 3: mentioned a minute ago by the nineteenth century German inventor
Speaker 3: Joseph Fober. This features heavily at the beginning of stories
Speaker 3: chapter here. So this machine was at various different times
Speaker 3: called the marvelous talking machine. You got a hyphen between
Speaker 3: talking machine and also the euphonia from the Greek meaning
Speaker 3: good sound or sweet sound. We'll see about that as
Speaker 3: we as we go on. Robi included one illustration of
Speaker 3: the machine for you to look at here. I think
Speaker 3: this may have been from some kind of promotional material
Speaker 3: when this machine was featured in an exhibit that I'll
Speaker 3: describe in a bit.
Speaker 2: I love it in part because right there is this
Speaker 2: angelic human face like right there on the machine, seemingly
Speaker 2: as like decoration or maybe tribute. I'm not sure, but
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if it's actually necessary to the mechanics
Speaker 2: of the device.
Speaker 3: Here, I think it sort of is. Well, I'll explain.
Speaker 3: So story introduces Fober's machine through the eyes of another
Speaker 3: inventor and scientist of the day named Joseph Henry. A
Speaker 3: different Joseph, a researcher on electromagnetic induction and also the
Speaker 3: inaugural secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Henry encountered Faber's marvelous
Speaker 3: talking machine at a private exhibition in Philadelphia on December twentieth,
Speaker 3: eighteen forty five, and he described the demonstration in a
Speaker 3: letter to a colleague named HM. Alexander. So we have
Speaker 3: contemporaneous notes on what it was doing and what it
Speaker 3: looked like in this private demonstration. So here's how it worked.
Speaker 3: It was controlled by an operator via a mainly by
Speaker 3: foot pedals and a keyboard, essentially just like an organ,
Speaker 3: like a chamber organ, and in fact the device could
Speaker 3: in some ways be considered a modified organ. So you
Speaker 3: had a foot pedal that operated a bellows and that
Speaker 3: would supply airflow to the whole system, and the bellows
Speaker 3: pumped air through an artificial larynx that had vocal cords
Speaker 3: that were in this source said to be made of
Speaker 3: rubber and these so this artificial glottis or artificial vocal
Speaker 3: cords would vibrate to produce the fundamental sound of the
Speaker 3: machine's voice when air was flowing through them. And then
Speaker 3: you had sixteen keys on the keyboard which were connected
Speaker 3: by strings and levers to the various components that controlled
Speaker 3: the shaping of that sound of that, you know, the
Speaker 3: resonating sound from that airflow through the glottis into speech.
Speaker 3: One of the interesting things is, as we've been saying,
Speaker 3: this device actually had a face. So the face was
Speaker 3: made of carved wood, essentially a large doll head, but
Speaker 3: it had a hinged jaw. So maybe you should think
Speaker 3: of it more like a ventriloquist dummy. You're loving this,
Speaker 3: aren't you. Yeah, Night of the Living dummy. But it
Speaker 3: can actually speak. And so inside the dummy's mouth there
Speaker 3: was an ivory tongue that could be moved around inside
Speaker 3: the oral cavity to control the shape of the resonating chamber.
Speaker 3: And by controlling these different elements like the mouth and
Speaker 3: the tongue and all that, with the keys on the keyboard.
Speaker 3: It quote imposed time varying change to the air cavity
Speaker 3: appropriate for generating apparently convincing renditions of connected speech. So
Speaker 3: it may not have sounded perfect or even pleasant, but
Speaker 3: apparently people in the room could understand what the machine
Speaker 3: was saying when Fober operated it. So this is eighteen
Speaker 3: forty five and the machine is speaking intelligible words. Henry
Speaker 3: in this letter compares it favorably to a different talking machine,
Speaker 3: one he had seen years before. This was one of
Speaker 3: the ones you mentioned, Rob, the one built by the
Speaker 3: English scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone, again the telegraph guy.
Speaker 3: Wheatstone's talking machine was capable of being understood for the
Speaker 3: set of words it could produce, but Fober's machine was
Speaker 3: far superior because its speech repertoire was infinitely variable, so
Speaker 3: he could speak whole sentences, and those sentences could contain
Speaker 3: any words and any sounds he wanted, as long as
Speaker 3: they were in one of the covered languages. Obviously it
Speaker 3: couldn't do, you know, like tonal languages, or like speak
Speaker 3: Mandarin or something, But it seems like mainly it was
Speaker 3: speaking German and English. It was said at the time
Speaker 3: that it could speak any European language. Now, I think
Speaker 3: one thing that's really worth noting here is that if
Speaker 3: you imagine how a machine like this would work, the
Speaker 3: success of the performance would depend heavily on the skill
Speaker 3: of the operator, since the speech patterns are not like
Speaker 3: programmed and you know, not sort of expressed automatically, but
Speaker 3: expressed in real time by the player operating the bellows
Speaker 3: and the keys. And I think also there were some
Speaker 3: screws and stuff that would manipulate pitch and things like that,
Speaker 3: So you have to play this just like you would
Speaker 3: play a musical instrument. So different players using the same
Speaker 3: machine would probably produce fairly different sounding speech, even if
Speaker 3: they had memorized which keys corresponded to which phonetic units.
Speaker 3: So nobody ever read says this, But you know, I'm
Speaker 3: kind of picturing Fober as a sort of phantom of
Speaker 3: the opera at the at the organ keyboard. You know,
Speaker 3: he's not just like pressing the keys, but giving a
Speaker 3: real passionate and dramatic performance. When somebody sells it, he
Speaker 3: yells at yeah, make it say como tale vou or whatever.
Speaker 3: It also sang songs, by the way, I'll get into
Speaker 3: that in a minute. But I was wondering, what did
Speaker 3: what are people asking, you know, what's the equivalent in
Speaker 3: eighteen forty five of yelling out, you know, play Freebird?
Speaker 3: And I was thinking, maybe it's people are yelling for
Speaker 3: TYPICANU and Tyler too.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: So an interesting detail that story includes in this chapter
Speaker 3: is that this was not the first time Fober had
Speaker 3: built a talking machine. In fact, this was not the
Speaker 3: first time Fober had built this exact talking machine. There
Speaker 3: was an earlier version of it that was destroyed by
Speaker 3: Fober himself, quote in a bout of depression and intoxication.
Speaker 3: I should say that nearly every source I read on
Speaker 3: Fober mentions something about him being disheveled or haunted, obsessed
Speaker 3: with his machine, and generally emotionally unwell or at the
Speaker 3: very least having a really rough time a lot of
Speaker 3: the time. Multiple writers describe him in terms containing a
Speaker 3: lot of pity. But so, it took Fober apparently twenty
Speaker 3: years to perfect the first version of the machine, the
Speaker 3: one that he drunkenly destroyed, but he was able to
Speaker 3: recreate the second version within a year of that. And
Speaker 3: this kind of suggests to me the possibility that the
Speaker 3: original creation of the machine may have really been a
Speaker 3: project of fundamental research about phonetics more than it was
Speaker 3: about engineering. And so once he had the knowledge in
Speaker 3: hand of how each sound was produced, like what the
Speaker 3: shape of the oral cavity, you know, how that corresponded
Speaker 3: to the sounds, recreating the machine itself might have been
Speaker 3: a relatively simple proposition. Is really what you needed was
Speaker 3: the knowledge about how phonetics correspond to physical shapes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, had that, and certainly they had notes on the
Speaker 2: matter and his designs recorded. It would be easier to
Speaker 2: come back and reproduce that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So Joseph Henry's letter about Faber's talking machine demonstration
Speaker 3: it also includes speculation about the uses to which a
Speaker 3: machine like this could be put. One interesting idea he
Speaker 3: has is what if you could take a spoken message
Speaker 3: at one location and code that spoken message into inputs
Speaker 3: on this keyboard on this machine, and then, through electromagnetic means,
Speaker 3: transmit those keystrokes across wires to a totally separate second location,
Speaker 3: and then those electrical signals could operate the speech organs
Speaker 3: of the doll faced machine. In the second location. You
Speaker 3: would essentially be transmitting speech itself. Across great distance. Notable
Speaker 3: that Henry's idea here is roughly thirty years before Alexander
Speaker 3: Graham Bell demonstrates the principle of the telephone. But there
Speaker 3: is a very important difference, which is that while Bell's
Speaker 3: telephone and these are stories words here quote transmitted an
Speaker 3: electrical analog of the speech pressure wave. Henry's description alluded
Speaker 3: to representing speech in compressed form based on slowly varying
Speaker 3: movements of the operator's hands, fingers, and feet as they
Speaker 3: formed the keystroke sequences required to produce an utterance, a
Speaker 3: signal processing technique that would not be implemented into telephone
Speaker 3: transmission systems for nearly another century. So the interesting thing
Speaker 3: about Henry here is that he's not just imagining converting
Speaker 3: the sound of a voice into an impulse that travels
Speaker 3: along the wire. He's imagining a coding process. It's put
Speaker 3: into code for the transmission and then decoded by the
Speaker 3: machine at the other end.
Speaker 2: I can't help but try to imagine this alternate past
Speaker 2: in which instead of early telephones, people all had this
Speaker 2: weird cherub head mounted on the wall that then speaks
Speaker 2: to you. In this I'm assumed slightly haunting voice.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'll get to the haunting voice in a second,
Speaker 3: but anyway, story flags It as historically significant that this
Speaker 3: one invention had both succeeded in producing generally intelligible synthetic
Speaker 3: speech to people in the room with it, and it
Speaker 3: had inspired at least one onlooker to start considering ideas
Speaker 3: for the electrical transmission of low bandwidth speech from one
Speaker 3: place to another. But neither of these possibilities really went anywhere.
Speaker 3: Henry did not devote any more effort to musing about
Speaker 3: the electrical transmission, and Fober's machine ended up being a
Speaker 3: circus side show, almost literally. So after this, Fober needed money,
Speaker 3: and beginning in eighteen forty six, to get money, he
Speaker 3: signed on to demonstrate his machine for p. T. Barnum
Speaker 3: got to have something for everybody, even people who want
Speaker 3: a talking doll head operated by a disheveled German organ master.
Speaker 3: So Faber committed to exhibit the marvelous Speaking Machine four
Speaker 3: Barnum at the Egyptian Hall in London. This was like
Speaker 3: a general exhibition hall in Piccadilly, which hosted all kinds
Speaker 3: of shows, but I think especially in the latter part
Speaker 3: of the nineteenth century, it was known for showing like
Speaker 3: a lot of Mountebanks and fraudulent spiritualist demonstrators. Yeah, I'll
Speaker 3: reveal to you that you're actually a reincarnation of Cleopatra.
Speaker 3: Lucky you. But by noting that that's just a random thing,
Speaker 3: I'm not trying to cast dispersions on Fober, because I
Speaker 3: want to stress that it seems totally clear that Fober
Speaker 3: was no con artist. As best we can tell, his
Speaker 3: machine really did work, and when played correctly, it did
Speaker 3: really speak original sentences that people could, for the most
Speaker 3: part understand.
Speaker 2: Though.
Speaker 3: One thing that emerges from reading descriptions of this is
Speaker 3: that coding intelligible information and sounding like speech are two
Speaker 3: completely different things. So it seems that a lot of
Speaker 3: people could tell what the machine was saying, but still
Speaker 3: they were not very impressed by what they heard. And
Speaker 3: I found a spectacularly evocative description of what the machine
Speaker 3: was like I recorded in a book called Instruments and
Speaker 3: the Imagination by Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman,
Speaker 3: Princeton University Press, nineteen ninety nine. But the main thing
Speaker 3: here is that they're quoting a person who saw the
Speaker 3: machine in person in eighteen forty six, I believe, and
Speaker 3: then wrote about it in a memoir. But generally the
Speaker 3: authors here they note that there were like some satirical
Speaker 3: articles making reference to Faber's machine, suggesting, for example, that
Speaker 3: it could be used to replace the speaker of the
Speaker 3: House of Commons. Yak, yeah, those wacky politicians. But then
Speaker 3: well they do kind of make a funny point. Actually,
Speaker 3: they say, like you could just program it to say
Speaker 3: order order at ten minute intervals.
Speaker 2: Well that's pretty good, that's funny today.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But anyway, then there's a part of the book
Speaker 3: where they're including this evocative written account which is from
Speaker 3: a London theater manager named John Hollingshead who saw this
Speaker 3: machine in person when he was nineteen years old and
Speaker 3: then wrote about it in a memoirs or some book.
Speaker 3: But anyway, this is Hollingshead's account. The exhibitor, Professor Fober,
Speaker 3: was a sad faced man, dressed in respectable, well worn
Speaker 3: clothes that were soiled by contact with tools, wood and machinery.
Speaker 3: The room looked like a laboratory and workshop, which it was.
Speaker 3: The professor was not too clean, and his hair and
Speaker 3: beard sadly wanted the attention of a barber. I have
Speaker 3: no doubt that he slept in the same room as
Speaker 3: his figure, his scientific Frankenstein Monster. Note. I guess the
Speaker 3: novel would have only been a few decades old this time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, eighteen eighteen on Frankenstein there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sorry, going on with hallings Head and I felt
Speaker 3: the secret influence of an idea that the two were
Speaker 3: destined to live and die together.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, this is those pretty strong words.
Speaker 3: Yes, the professor, with a slight German accent, put his
Speaker 3: wonderful toy in motion. He explained its action. It was
Speaker 3: not necessary to prove the absence of deception. One keyboard
Speaker 3: touched by the professor produced words which, slowly and deliberately,
Speaker 3: in a hoarse, sepulchral voice, came from the mouth of
Speaker 3: the figure, as if from the depths of a tomb.
Speaker 3: It wanted little imagination to make the very few visitors
Speaker 3: believe that the figure contained an imprisoned human or half
Speaker 3: human being, bound to speak slowly when tormented by the
Speaker 3: unseen power outside. No one thought for a moment that
Speaker 3: they were being fooled by a second edition of The
Speaker 3: Invisible Girl fra Allod And by the way, the reference
Speaker 3: to the Invisible Girl fraud, I believe is about the
Speaker 3: many fake machines and fake automata that were actually worked
Speaker 3: by having a human hidden inside operating it but going
Speaker 3: out so holling said, says, nobody thought that there was
Speaker 3: an invisible girl operating. This as clear, this is real.
Speaker 3: He goes on, there were truth, laborious invention, and good
Speaker 3: faith in every part of the melancholy room. As a
Speaker 3: crowning display, the head sang a sepulchral version of God
Speaker 3: Save the Queen, which suggested, inevitably, God save the inventor.
Speaker 3: This extraordinary effect was achieved by the professor working two keyboards,
Speaker 3: one for the words and one for the music. Never
Speaker 3: probably before or since, has the national anthem been so sung,
Speaker 3: sadder and wiser. I and the few visitors crept slowly
Speaker 3: from the place, leaving the professor with his one and
Speaker 3: only treasure, his child of infinite labor and unmeasurable sorrow.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, that is a lot. I mean, obviously, he's
Speaker 2: lee lays it on really thick about the sadness of
Speaker 2: the inventor here. And then also there's the ideas like
Speaker 2: this was no hoax, this was real and it was depressing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I thought, it's a weird mix of like like
Speaker 3: pity but real admiration, you know that, Like, there's something
Speaker 3: beautiful and honest and true about this machine and his
Speaker 3: devotion to it and the genius it took to create it.
Speaker 3: But also it makes everybody feel bad and nobody wants
Speaker 3: to look at it or listen to it, and everybody
Speaker 3: leaves feeling depressed. Yeah, something about that struck me as
Speaker 3: actually quite poignant and meaningful. Maybe we can come back
Speaker 3: to that in a minute, but I did want to
Speaker 3: flag that there was one notable visitor who, coming back
Speaker 3: to the Invisible Girl suspicion, he did at first suspect fraud,
Speaker 3: and that was the Duke of Wellington. I was reading
Speaker 3: about this in a book called The Shows of London
Speaker 3: by Richard Daniel Atlick, and at Lick recounts that Wellington,
Speaker 3: when he first went to the demonstration, he was so
Speaker 3: impressed by Faber's speaking machine that he asked to be
Speaker 3: allowed to touch the keys with his own fingers, you know,
Speaker 3: so he could see that it was genuine. And then
Speaker 3: he did confirm that it was genuine, and then he
Speaker 3: insisted that he'd be taught how to use it, so
Speaker 3: Fober taught the Duke to play the machine in both
Speaker 3: German and English, and Wellington did get it like he could.
Speaker 3: He could make it speak sentences in German and English,
Speaker 3: and he was amazed, writing in the visitor's log of
Speaker 3: the exhibit that the speaking machine, or the Euphonia, was
Speaker 3: quote an extraordinary production of mechanical genius. Faber's machine also
Speaker 3: got rave reviews in The Times, in the Illustrated London News.
Speaker 3: A lot of people like looked at it and they
Speaker 3: they thought that, like, yeah, this is a work of genius.
Speaker 3: It's incredible that he's done this. But at the same time,
Speaker 3: audiences really were not into it. Barnum himself noticed that
Speaker 3: Fober's machine was not attracting crowds, it was not selling
Speaker 3: tickets and not generating revenue, and so eventually he took
Speaker 3: Fober's machine out of the Egyptian Hall in London and
Speaker 3: added it to a traveling exhibit that went around the
Speaker 3: English countryside doing performances. And from here Fober himself seems
Speaker 3: to kind of disappear from the historical record. Some sources
Speaker 3: indicate that he may have died by suicide during this period,
Speaker 3: though that isn't known. For sure, But after historical sources
Speaker 3: stopped mentioning Fober himself, they still make references to his
Speaker 3: machine reading from story here quote. Although his talking machine
Speaker 3: continued to make side show like appearances in Europe and
Speaker 3: North America over the next thirty years. It seems a relative,
Speaker 3: perhaps a niece or nephew you may have inherited the
Speaker 3: machine and performed with it to generate income.
Speaker 2: So maybe no matter whatever happened to him, maybe a
Speaker 2: relative with a little more showmanship like stepped in and
Speaker 2: was able to make at least some sort of an
Speaker 2: income off of it.
Speaker 3: Yes, but then again, like I'm struck by the strange,
Speaker 3: ironic sadness of this. This this was actually a scientifically
Speaker 3: significant invention, Like he had done something kind of amazing,
Speaker 3: but it just never really went anywhere under his mastery.
Speaker 3: And then yeah, maybe a relative was a better Carnival
Speaker 3: Barker essentially to perform with the machine and make some
Speaker 3: money off of it.
Speaker 2: I mean, it reminds me of so many advancements in
Speaker 2: say robotics, that we've seen over the years, where oftentimes,
Speaker 2: you know, to a certain extent, unfairly, they'll just be
Speaker 2: one little clip of it that goes viral and people
Speaker 2: react to be it some sort of you know, a
Speaker 2: human likeness with facial features that seem to be moving
Speaker 2: or operating in an uncanny way, or something like the
Speaker 2: various dog robots from Boston Dynamics that are very impressive
Speaker 2: but also may be interpreted as being a bit creepy.
Speaker 2: And so even though they are these, you know, they're
Speaker 2: often examples of a real impressive technological advancement setting aside
Speaker 2: actual applications, you can have a situation where something like
Speaker 2: that is not as comforting, not as entertaining as say
Speaker 2: an act of puppetry, or even an act of just
Speaker 2: outright well maybe not fraud, but say a robot or
Speaker 2: a costume depicting a robot maybe ultimately maybe more reassuring,
Speaker 2: maybe more fun compared to the actual thing.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, which may which may just be fun or
Speaker 3: may in fact be fraud, depending on what exactly they're
Speaker 3: saying about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but this.
Speaker 3: Is a great point and it brings me to I
Speaker 3: just wanted to mention a few of the the general
Speaker 3: notes about the history of speech synthesis from the end
Speaker 3: of this book chapter by Brad's story Story Rights that
Speaker 3: you know, while there are technological use cases for speech synthesizers.
Speaker 3: You know, we've got a number of them operating in
Speaker 3: consumer technology today, and even before you had you know,
Speaker 3: personal digital assistants and stuff, there would be use cases
Speaker 3: for speech synthesizers for, for example, people who have a
Speaker 3: disability that makes it difficult or impossible for them to speak.
Speaker 3: Another one is that apparently this was actually used by
Speaker 3: the Allies in World War Two, there were some forms
Speaker 3: of speech synthesis that would allow sort of covert coded
Speaker 3: transmissions of something like a phone call, so you could
Speaker 3: have a phone call between like FDR and Winston Churchill.
Speaker 3: It's not really a phone call, it's like a transmitted
Speaker 3: synthesized bit of speech, and so it's very secure. But
Speaker 3: it doesn't sound like the person talking. It sounds maybe
Speaker 3: more like the euphonia, kind of robotic and unnatural and
Speaker 3: maybe making the president's giggle a bit a president Prime minister.
Speaker 3: But anyway, So what story says is that a large
Speaker 3: number of these systems have actually been primarily used as
Speaker 3: research tools, as scientific tools for understanding the nature of
Speaker 3: human speech. It's by trying to reproduce human speech and
Speaker 3: failing at it that we come closer to understanding how
Speaker 3: speech actually works in the human body. But the second
Speaker 3: general observation that I thought is interesting, and this seems
Speaker 3: to be very much reflected in the Fober's machine example.
Speaker 3: It is much easier to create a machine that can
Speaker 3: speak intelligibly than one that can speak naturally. So that
Speaker 3: indicates that when we talk, there's actually more than one
Speaker 3: thing going on. Yes, we are conveying mental information coded
Speaker 3: in words, and the substance of that coding is phonetic.
Speaker 3: It's a series of sounds. But of course, you know,
Speaker 3: the ironic thing to people who were used to thinking
Speaker 3: about words as text is that the phonetic core of
Speaker 3: language long predates writing, so like the written text of
Speaker 3: a word is a visual code for the sound of
Speaker 3: the word, which is the code for its meaning. But anyway,
Speaker 3: so machines for hundreds of years have been able to
Speaker 3: produce more or less intelligible phonetic code. They can speak words,
Speaker 3: and people can understand what the words are supposed to be,
Speaker 3: But it doesn't necessarily mean that people perceive these machines
Speaker 3: as speaking, because there's another important quality to speech that
Speaker 3: was not really captured by these early machines, and you
Speaker 3: could argue is still somewhat lacking in the best speech
Speaker 3: synthesis of today, and that is the natural character of
Speaker 3: continuous speech. These machines always produce speech that sounded stilted, unreal, alien.
Speaker 3: It was never something that would make you feel like
Speaker 3: you were actually being talked to, as much as sort
Speaker 3: of receiving a weird alien code in your language and
Speaker 3: here I just want to read from the stories chapter quote.
Speaker 3: As a result, synthesis often presents itself as an oral
Speaker 3: caricature that can be perceived as an unnatural and sometimes
Speaker 3: amusing rendition of a desired utterance or speech sound. It
Speaker 3: is particularly unique to phonetics and speech science that the
Speaker 3: models used as tools to understand the scientific aspects of
Speaker 3: a complex system produce a signal intended to be heard
Speaker 3: as if it were a human. As such, the quality
Speaker 3: of a speech synthesis can be rather harshly judged because
Speaker 3: the model on which it is based has not accounted
Speaker 3: for the myriad of subtle variations and details that combine
Speaker 3: in natural human speech. So to paraphrase, speech is so
Speaker 3: much more than just the words, And even if you
Speaker 3: can get the words right, there's still something that is
Speaker 3: that is lacking and this is going to take a
Speaker 3: lot of work to try to capture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is fascinating to think about, you know,
Speaker 2: especially given what you mentioned earlier about it's the importance
Speaker 2: of speech the synthesizer technology to aid people who cannot
Speaker 2: speak or have lost the ability to speak. You know,
Speaker 2: I gave probably one of the most famous, if not
Speaker 2: the most famous examples of this is, of course, the
Speaker 2: speech synthesizer used by theoretical Stephen Hawking. Like one of
Speaker 2: the interesting things about his story with it, as I remember,
Speaker 2: is that just me mentioning it, you can probably sort
Speaker 2: of hear the voice, the synthesized voice of Stephen Hawking
Speaker 2: in your head. And I know that at some point
Speaker 2: like that was you know, an early system he got there,
Speaker 2: and later on in life he had he could have
Speaker 2: switched the voice up, he could have changed the voice,
Speaker 2: and I'm assuming could have maybe improved upon it, but
Speaker 2: by that point he felt that this was his voice.
Speaker 2: You know, you can't switch it up. You know, this
Speaker 2: is this is how I speak, and this is how
Speaker 2: I hear myself. So I always found that that interesting,
Speaker 2: and especially when and then you can compare that to
Speaker 2: some other cases like you know, film credit Roger Ebert
Speaker 2: late in life, you know, you could no longer speak,
Speaker 2: but had I think they had a more robust system
Speaker 2: put together based on samples of you know, the the
Speaker 2: great catalog of his own recorded speeches and reviews and
Speaker 2: so forth that they could draw upon, and then looking
Speaker 2: into the future, you have situations like James Earl Jones's
Speaker 2: Darth Vader voice, that being you know, sort of archived
Speaker 2: and prepared for so that in the future you can
Speaker 2: you can basically have like a machine synthesized version of
Speaker 2: that voice that will stand in as a sort of
Speaker 2: one to one replication of what James Earl Jones did
Speaker 2: in life with the voice acting, or at least so.
Speaker 3: The proponent of the technology would say, I'm sure there
Speaker 3: would be critics who would say it's never going to
Speaker 3: be at one to one.
Speaker 2: Right, right, And then of course there's also the argument
Speaker 2: specifically with only with Darth Vader. Here am I discussing this,
Speaker 2: but obviously the case can be made that like we
Speaker 2: we shouldn't reproduce, you know, deceased actors' voices to continue
Speaker 2: a fictional role. We should employ new living actors. And
Speaker 2: existing living voice actors who can do the voice. I
Speaker 2: think with Darth Vader in particular, you could make a
Speaker 2: strong case for that because there are other voice actors
Speaker 2: who do officially voice act that character and do a
Speaker 2: great job with it. What does it mean if if
Speaker 2: that individual's job is potentially taken by this sort of
Speaker 2: machine likeness of that voice that is authorized based on
Speaker 2: the voice of a you know, of a retired or
Speaker 2: or in some cases you know, deceased individual.
Speaker 3: Well, we're going a little off topic now, but I
Speaker 3: will say that I stand by what I've said before,
Speaker 3: which is I'm firmly in the camp that I prefer
Speaker 3: recasting with a different actor as opposed to using technology
Speaker 3: to try to synthesize the voice or appearance of an
Speaker 3: actor who, for whatever reason cannot be present. People have
Speaker 3: been recasting the same role with different actors for decades.
Speaker 3: That happens all the time. Like, what's the problem with it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I agree, I agree, But in some cases, is
Speaker 2: it possible that a role that's been established by a
Speaker 2: living actor could not be just masterfully redone by a
Speaker 2: clunky machine with the face of a cherub that is
Speaker 2: manipulated by a sad German Man who needs a haircut.
Speaker 2: I think there's some potential there, like I don't know
Speaker 2: the next James Bond.
Speaker 3: Maybe this is the only film genre I'm interested in
Speaker 3: from now on, high tension espionage movies starring the Euphonia.
Speaker 2: So there you have it. The machine speaks, obviously, I'd
Speaker 2: love to hear from everyone out there if you have
Speaker 2: thoughts on all of this, and certainly anyone out there
Speaker 2: who has direct experience with speech synthesizer technology for one
Speaker 2: use or another right in, we would love to hear
Speaker 2: from you.
Speaker 3: Just a reminder, I just the speech synthesis or speech
Speaker 3: synthesizer is one of the hardest pairs of words to enunciate,
Speaker 3: and I've had to say it so many times in
Speaker 3: this episode. I just want to be recognized, especially for
Speaker 3: the times I probably did it wrong.
Speaker 2: Yes, well it's easy for the babyface machines though, Yeah,
Speaker 2: so at any rate. Yeah, if you want to listen
Speaker 2: to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you
Speaker 2: will find them in the Stuff to Bliw Your Mind
Speaker 2: podcast feed with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mondays,
Speaker 2: we do a listener mail Wednesdays, we do a short
Speaker 2: form artufactor monster fact, and then on Fridays we set
Speaker 2: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
Speaker 2: film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
Speaker 3: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 3: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 3: topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
Speaker 3: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Speaker 3: Mind dot com.
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