The variety itself is staggering.
Like human faces, no two voices sound exactly similar.
Add to that the various inflections and emotions, the stresses on the syllables, the accents.
Replicating the nuances of speech is anything but easy.
His equipment could produce the five long vowels artificially.
It sounded very robotic, like an alien speaking under water as Lisa Guernsey of theNew York Timesdescribed it.
After that day in 1939, we knew specifically how inhuman machined speech should sound.
The buzz tone was the building block for vowel sounds and nasal punch in sounds.
The hissing sound was the building block for those sounds associated with consonants.
These sounds were combined and sent through a loudspeaker.
Different words could be combined into different sentences based on the manipulation of keys and sounds.
And of course, all this must be done with exactly the correct timing.
It took Harper a year of constant practice before she was learned to operate the machine with precision.
She can even make it sing, as demonstrated in the following video.
Checkoutwhatisthevoder.comfor more demonstration of the VODERs speech capabilities.
Voder demonstration by Bell Labs on 1939 New York World’s Fair.
