Bell Labs: Background: Bell Labs Text-to-Speech Synthesis: Then and Now

Description

One of the more famous moments in Bell Labs' synthetic speech research was the sample created by John L. Kelly in 1962, using an IBM 704 computer. Kelly's vocoder synthesizer recreated the song "Bicycle Built for Two," with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Arthur C. Clarke, then visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility, saw this remarkable demonstration and later used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for "2001: A Space Odyssey," where the HAL9000 computer sings this song as he is disassembled by astronaut Dave Bowman.

Original URL

http://www.bell-labs.com/news/1997/march/5/2.html

http://www.bell-labs.com/news/1997/march/5/2.html