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