July 13, 2024 • 57 mins
Long before such things were possible, our ancestors envisioned artificial heads that were capable of speech. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the journey from ancient tales of artifice and wizardry to the early breakthroughs in speech synthesis technology. (originally published 06/29/2023)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and Hey it's Saturday. It's time to venture
into the vault once more for one of our core
episodes from the past. This is going to be The
Machine Speaks, Originally published on six twenty nine, twenty twenty three.
We really hope you enjoy this one. It's a journey
(00:27):
through everything from ancient tales of artifice and wizardry to
the early breakthroughs in speech synthesis technology. Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick, and today we're going
to be talking about some early voice synthesis machines. Rob
I actually got interested in this topic because last week,
when we were watching the Weird House Cinema movie The
Black Hole, I was thinking about Roddy McDowell's voice when
he's doing a voice for the robot character who shares
(01:16):
a lot of proverbs with the human characters. And I
kept listening to his line delivery and I couldn't decide
if he was trying to do quote robot voice or not.
He seemed to kind of dip in and out of it.
You know what I mean when I say robot voice,
where a character's playing a robot and they say things
like this, Well.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Of course I know what you are talking about, Joe.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
I got kind of interested in the history of robot voice.
I was like, where does that come from? And I
was digging around a little. I'm sure there is a
good answer on that, but I don't know. My short
search didn't really turn up anything interesting, but it did
lead me indirectly to what we're talking about today, which is,
of course, we have the voice synthesis systems that that
(02:00):
are largely digital today. Before that, you had a lot
of electrical and electro mechanical systems for synthesizing human voices.
But actually there is an even earlier generation, which are
the purely mechanical voice synthesizers before electricity even came into
the picture. And that is what really stole my heart,
(02:21):
especially one particular machine of this type that I'm going
to talk about in the second half of this episode.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
I think, yeah, this is a fascinating topic, in part
because look at it. Look at where we are now,
right it's easy today in our Internet age for just
the average Internet user to engage with various chatbots and
generative AI, text to speech and so forth. And so
we're able to interact with an artifact, a thing that
(02:47):
reflects human will, that has been designed to do key
and telling things that have long been the hallmarks of
human activity, artistic generation, creative writing and conversation, or especially speech.
And of course it's you know, it's easy nowadays to
do that, right, to transform into audible or even video
content what is either written by human or or created
(03:11):
with some sort of a chat bot machine. And the
results may be amusing, they may may be disastrous. But
we're in this age where the idea of the machine
speaking is not in and of itself groundbreaking, or at
least if it is groundbreaking, or if it's amazing, it's
that it's a lower level of amazement compared to previous ages.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Well, as you say, it's very integrated into modern technology.
So there's you know, Siri and Alexa, all these like
home devices that speak, GPS devices for the car, you know,
that speak to you, but almost all of them are
still the subject of amusement if you actually pay attention
to what the voice sounds like, you know, like reading
emotions into the voice that's telling you what to do
(03:54):
as you're driving. That always makes me laugh because it
always seems a little bit annoyed.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, yeah, what's series whole deal that sort of thing, right?
You know. The other interesting angle on all of this
is that are modern technological advancements here, or even some
of the historic technological advancements like they are kind of
the echo of a more ancient longing for this sort
of thing. It connects to something that's just fascinated us
(04:25):
for a long time, the idea generally of non human
entities engaging in speech. And you could you could go
absolutely wild chasing down the various divisions of this, right,
the various myths, legends, and traditions concerning the speech of animals, plants,
inorganic materials, supernatural entities, you know, voices seemingly internal but
(04:47):
also external to our individual experience.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Though I would say there is an interesting thing about
machines or human or automata or human artifacts in general
when compared to imagining an animal speaker or any other
usually not speaking things starting to speak, which is, if
you're talking about a machine that does it. That means
somebody has to make that machine and somebody has to
(05:10):
work that machine, and it kind of reminds me of
the idea of grammar in language. You know, the interesting
thing about grammar is that when we use language, we
all use grammar, so we have an intuitive grasp of
the rules of grammar, but without serious study, people can't
actually tell you what those rules are. And so, like,
you know, that had to be in a sense a
(05:31):
science to back engineer the rules of grammar that we
use intuitively to like make them systematic and you know,
actually discover what those rules are. The same thing could
be said about the phonetic rules that produce the intelligible speech.
We can all do it if we can speak, but
we don't necessarily understand what the individual physical properties of
(05:54):
a word are, and so we wouldn't necessarily know how
to make that same word come out of a machine.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, there are all these things that you have to
deconstruct before you can attempt to reproduce it artificially. And
we see that time and time again with in robotics,
for example. You know, things that we take for granted
concerning human movement, just about anything else you could imagine
it becomes so much more difficult to try and reproduce
that you've got to understand what it actually is on
(06:22):
an entirely new level.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
First, Now, I am to understand that before anybody actually
made a machine that could approximate or synthesize a human
voice and produce intelligible speech, people were thinking about this
as a concept.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah yeah, and this is not surprising. You know, this
is kind of the meat of science fiction. Right before
we can do it, we dream of it one way
or another, no matter what our exact grasp of science
happens to be. It always reminds me of that line
in William Gibson's Neuromancer where the character has made a deal,
(06:57):
a pact with a powerful AI, and it's pointed out like,
this is the sort of thing that in you know,
centuries ago, people only dreamed of making a deal with
a devil, and now we've made it possible through our
ingenuity and invention.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Congratulations.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah, so so yeah. Narrowing down here into generally the
realm of alleged human creations that through at least partial technology,
but also sometimes wizardry and alchemy and other things that
are kind of like you know, bunched in there together
(07:33):
with with actual technology to create some sort of a
device capable of speech. And then there are some also
some related things that are tied in there as well.
And a lot of it comes down to the idea
of a head, an artificial head that speaks.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
I found something so loaded and revealing about that. As
a fact, the history of these machines, so many of
them had fa whether real or imagined, These machines, so
many of them early on had heads or faces, so
like it wouldn't just be a speaker like you would
have today, that's you know, it's just a mechanical device
for making the sound. It's like that the presence of
(08:13):
a head or a face was considered important or at
least desirable.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah, and I wondered to what extent part of it
is just an echo of these earlier ideas. So going
to run through a few of these here. One of
the most famous, mainly from a literary tradition, as we'll
discuss here, is the idea of the brazen head. And
ultimately I guess there's more than one brazen head. We
can say brazen heads artificial heads that could speak. There's
(08:42):
a basically a lot of these stories concerned thirteenth century
English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, who's come up
on the show before, though this particular version of the
story doesn't seem to emerge until the sixteenth century, and
it does so within the works of contemporary drama.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I think we talked about Roger Bacon at length in
an episode we did about the invention of fireworks, which
may come back and feature again in the feed soon.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah, yeah, I believe you're right. Yeah. I think Bacon
did come up in that he had a reputation as
not only a very learned man in both natural philosophy
and theology, and I should drive home definitely existed. I
don't think there's any doubt that there was a Roger Bacon.
But then there are all these other stories that he
was also potentially a wizard who was capable of producing
(09:32):
fabulous automata, either through amazing feats of clockwork ingenuity that
I think many would say was ultimately, you know, impossible
during his time period, or failing that, he was into
alchemy and of course dark dank necromancy.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
I think the way I conceive of Roger Bacon is
that he of course was a real figure. He was
of great intellectual note and significance, but much about his
sort of general reputation is kind of legendary, if that
makes sense. I mean, there are many things we know
about him that are true, but there's also just sort
of an aura or a vibe about him that is
(10:12):
not really based in reality.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah, I mean, he becomes a character in literature, especially
in these accounts, so you can you can sort of
look at the different phases like historic individual ideas and
you know, misunderstandings have said real life individual and then
eventually that echoes into the fictional version of the person.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Which that's the more like wizard version.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Yeah, yeah, And so there are a few different examples
of this. This was like a popular motif for a while.
There's a sixteenth century prose romance titled the Famous History
of Friar Bacon, and it tells of Bacon trying to
give a replica of a human head speech and having
to call in the devil for help. Cool. Other versions
of this tale describe it as an artificial head given
(10:55):
life by demons, which was capable of spontaneous speech and
of course telling the future I mean, what else would
you tell right right? Robert Greene's sixteen thirty play Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay mentions this several times, citing quote
Bacon's necromatic skill and heads of Brass that quote can
(11:18):
utter any voice. The idea that's exploring both of these
works is that Bacon wished to build a wall of
brass around Britain with the help of the Brazen Head.
He fails and the head explodes.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Why have I never heard this side? It as like
an early science fiction tale.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
I don't know. I'm probably not doing due diligence on
exactly what happens and everything, at least like saying, well,
in Star Wars, the bad guys make one planet to
blow up another planet, and then the planet they may
blows up. You know, That's that's really skipping over a
lot of the nuance. And so I think there's there's
inevitably more nuance here, but I just I didn't get
into it. Okay, So this idea of the satanic brasshead
(11:57):
of Roger Bacon persists despite the fact that there's no
indication that anything like this even created purely through technology
and not Satanic wizardry was part of Bacon's world. He
was interested in optics and certainly various instruments scientific instruments
of brass of the day. But there's no indication that
he ever built an artificial head and tried to get
it to speak.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Okay, so this is part of the wizard aura, not
part of his biography.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Right though, you know, we have to drive home to
is it possible that Roger Bacon, as a hobby did
what he could to create you know, I mean it's possible,
it's not. You know, I don't think he would have
gotten to speak. But there are various sort of ways
you could interpret this as having some basis in reality
that doesn't involve magic or superscience of the day. Okay, Now,
(12:43):
I went to my bookshelf and I pulled off my
dusty copy of Brewer's Dictionary Phrase and Fable. It provides
a little more insight on the legend. Quote. It was
said if Bacon heard it speak, he would succeed in
his projects, if not, he would fail. His familiar mile
was set to watch, and while Bacon slept, the head
spoke thrice. Time is half an hour later, it said,
(13:07):
time was in another half hour, it said times past
fell down and was broken to atoms to atoms to atoms. Yes,
surely Adams means something different here, Adams rights been discovered
at the time. I think it just means like small
parts or something.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Yeah, yes, yeah, that would be hilarious if it was
literally broken to atoms.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah. So I don't know if it if it works though,
it sounds like it's kind of an alarm clock that explodes.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Well, but I don't understand the difference between time was
and times pasted. They're both past tens.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Hm m. That's a good point. Time is, time was
times past. It seems like you would want the president
there somewhere, but yeah, that's that's that's what it allegedly said.
And you'll you'll find woodcuts that that have this this
motif on them as well.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Like it would it made more sense if it said
the three things where time will be, time is, time was,
but this seems more like time is, time was, time
was was.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Now. Brewers notes that reference to the references to the
Brazen Head are just common in literature, appearing frequently in
early romances but with Eastern origins, though it doesn't get
into that a lot elsewhere in the volume. It's also
noted that artificial heads that speak occur elsewhere as well.
(14:32):
And some of these are brazen heads, and some of
these are other things, but they're kind of I think
it's important to run through briefly some of these examples
because they kind of paint a picture of not only
some of these other ideas of artificial heads speaking and
telling the future, but related non technological non artifacts that
(14:52):
kind of help inform what we think technology can do. Okay, okay,
So one of them is a brazen head in the
possession of Pope Sylvester the Second in the tenth century,
which he also constructed, and misinterpretations of its utterances could
prove disastrous.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Oh, is this also believed to be Satanic in some way?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
I didn't go too deep on Satanic implications, but possibly, I.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Guess it would depend on if this legend is associated
with pro Pope Sylvester or anti Pope Sylvester sources.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Right, right, But you can definitely see that they're in
the head itself, regardless of what's supposed to be powering it.
Like this, it ties into two oracular traditions. You know,
the idea that here is this thing that can give
you cryptic wisdom if you have the wisdom to decipher
what it's telling you. Another example that's brought up in
Brewers is or the Colossi of Memnon, which we did
(15:48):
at least a whole I don't know, I can't remember
as one episode or multiple episodes, but we discussed this
on stuff to blow your mind. This is a fascinating
topic in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
This was basically, I think a statue or a pair
of statues, part of sort of a ruins complex that
was famous during in Roman Egypt as basically because it
would make sounds, and there were different theories about how
it made sounds and why.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Yeah, yeah, it seems like I think some said it
was capable of speech, but generally it's described as singing
or some sort of a note. And as we discussed,
while there are some I think unlikely theories regarding the
use of some sort of intentional sound generating device or devices,
it seems like a more likely explanation would have to
do with peculiarities of the stone as it heated in
(16:34):
the sun and then cooled at night. Anyway, go back
and listen to that episode if you want to know
about them. They have a pretty fascinating history.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
We'll remember better in the original.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yes, there's the head of Orpheus at Lesbos, predicting the
doom and death of Cyrus the Great. However, I believe
this is generally thought to be the actual head of
the hero Orpheus, after he was torn apart by the
main ads of Dionysus during a bacchanalia for the sin
of worshiping Apollo or having worshiped Apollo. I'm not sure
(17:06):
what the exact charge was, but still a prophetic, disembodied
head that still continues to speak. Brewers also mentions the
head of Minos brought by Odin to Scandinavia, which I
didn't know what to make of this, because Minos is
of course the mythical king of Crete that we've discussed
(17:26):
on the show before as well. I think the actual
figure in reference here might be Nimir, the god of
wisdom that is beheaded in the Aservaniir War. Odin claims
this head and it continues to speak secret wisdom. Again,
this is another one that's not a mechanical head. It's
the head of an actual defeated divine being that continues
(17:48):
to live on and to speak. There are tales of
Albertus Magnus having an earthen head, which during the thirteenth
century was said to speak and move until Thomas Aquinas
breaks sit by accident, and Magnus says, there goes the
labor of thirty years, because now it's broken. So I
don't know what to make of that one either completely.
(18:09):
But again we see this motif of a fabulous artificial
head that speaks, that manages to break one way or another,
either something fails, somebody knocks it over, or you know,
it explodes after you hit this nooze alarm twice. Then
there's Alexander's statue of Ascalapius, the Greek god of medicine,
that was said to speak, but Lucian wrote that the
(18:32):
sounds came via a concealed man who spoke through tubes.
So here's an example of some sort of of a creation.
I guess it depends on you look at either a
statue that isn't intended to speak, or through supernatural machinations speaks,
But according to Lucian, it's in neither of those. It's
(18:54):
just tubes and some guy like hiding in the bushes
speaking through the tubes, which is still clever and still technological,
but is trickery.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Nonetheless, I think the Lucian you're alluding to there is
Lucian of Samosada.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Is that right? I believe so, yes, yeah, this.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Is like this was an ancient satirist from Syria who
is quite hilarious and was kind of a skeptic debunker
of the of like the second century CE, which is
sort of strange, but he was in that mold and
he made like vicious mockery of people of all sorts
and different philosophies and stuff, and also wrote a satire
(19:32):
that some people have considered one of the earliest forms
of science fiction.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Now this also reminds me this is not I mean,
I guess it memory series. Maybe it did speak, But
there was of course the man faced Serpent God Glicon
of the second century that is often held up as
being a hoax, like it was actually a puppet according
to commentators. But I've always wondered what to make of that,
(19:59):
because it kind of if someone is performing puppetry and
people are having an emotional or even religious reaction to it,
it kind of depends how it's presented. Right, are you
presenting Glican the man face serpent as like, this is it?
This is an actual man face serpent God, Come take
a look that it's life. Is proof that he is real?
(20:20):
Or is it something else? Is it more like performance
or is it more like reinterpretation? You know, because you
have plenty of examples where people will carry out performances
in which people dress as divine and semi divine figures.
It's not supposed to be like, look at the proof here,
here is this hero on the stage. This means God
(20:40):
is real. Funny enough.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
I think Glicon was also written about by Lucian of
some Asada. But I guess the crucial question is like
is there an attempt at trickery or not? Like do
you want the audience to believe there is not somebody
behind the mask?
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Right? And you know that's interesting because that still kind
of applies to a lot of what's going on in
the world today with things like like chat box and
so forth. And you know, this idea that if we
know what is coming out of the box, what is
coming out of the artificial head? And you know, we
(21:17):
how are we interpreting it? And are we thinking there
is something there that is not. So it's like, on
what level is there trickery, and then there is like
interpretation of the trickery and so forth. But at any rate,
I think, you know, some of these examples they proved
that well before people could make any kind of a
mechanical thing, be it a head or not ahead that
(21:38):
could speak, we were still capable of dreaming about it.
And I think there's ample evidence that long before anyone
attempted to make a head that could talk through mechanical means,
individuals sought and sometimes found a voice emerging from disembodied heads,
either real ones the you know, the the remains of
human beings or other animals, or or likenesses of human heads,
(22:00):
either attached or detached from statues, and so forth. And
I think there's room between trickery and belief for the
suspension of belief and ritual as well to take into account.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
But of course, later on people would end up building real,
operable machines that were at least attempting to produce speech
that could be understood by humans.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
That's right, And this is where we get more into
the deconstruction of what human speech is, which in and
of itself is a whole subject, but there are key
moments where we see some major advancements being made here.
So another major entry to discuss in all of this
is the work of German born Russian doctor, physicist and
(22:50):
engineer Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, who lives seventeen twenty three through
seventeen ninety five. So he was a man of various
including the use of electricity and medicine, and at the
Saint Petersburg Science Academy at one point offered a prize
for advancements made in researching the mechanisms behind the vowels AEI, O,
(23:12):
and you in human speech. So in seventeen seventy nine
he presented his vowel organ to the university. The vowel
organ consisted of a series of resonators that produced vowel
like sounds on a constant pitch when excited by a read.
I found some illustrations of these basic resonators via the
(23:36):
UCL Psychology and Language Sciences Department. Here I also found
a website linked at this website where you can find
instructions for how to make your own resonators out of
plumbing supplies, which I found rather insightful. I did not
(23:56):
attempt it, but if you're into plumbing supplies and vowel sounds,
it seems like a natural craft choice.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
But the key insight being here that by changing the
shape of a physical resonating cavity, you can change the
sound of the vowel produced.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Right right. Another take on this. I was reading the
BBC Future article The Machines That Learned to Listen by
Kadia Musfych, and it describes these as resonance tubes connected
to organ pipes. So you know, this is not to
say that we have this is not on this like
the same level as some sort of imaginary brazen head
that's going to speak of its own and spout out,
(24:34):
spit out wisdom for you to interpret. This is about
just figuring out, you know, how these vowel sounds are
produced and reproducing them through a basic mechanical system. Musvich
also points out a few other key individuals in the
advancement of this technology. There's Wolfgang von Kimplin in Vienna,
who created a similar acoustic mechanical speech machine about ten
(24:57):
years after Kratzenstein. And then she also mentions English inventor
Charles Wheatstone, who would improve on this in the early
nineteenth century.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Charles Wheatstone. I'm going to mention him again in a minute,
but he's also notable because he was one of the
inventors of the first commercially successful form of the telegraph.
So we talked about him in our episode on your
mention of the telegraph. But when it comes to the
one you mentioned before, that von Kemplan's machine, this is
interesting because I read that while this machine was allegedly real,
(25:34):
it was a real attempt to make a machine that
would speak. Von Kemplan is now known for essentially being
a hoaxer because he tried to create other automata, including
a chess playing automaton that was actually a hoax. It
had a human inside it doing the moves, so it
was a fake robot.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Though as a fake still really impressive. It's interesting where
you get in like what sometimes you're wondering. You have
to wonder what the line knows between, you know, the
actual technological innovation and trickery. I mean, obviously it's deception,
and if you have a secret chamber in which there's
a whole person doing stuff, you know, that's a real
red flag there as well. But still the trickery is
(26:15):
pretty ingenious too.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean it takes skill to be
a good magician.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Anyway, this brings us to the example that I was
really excited to talk about in today's episode, which is
the speaking machine of a nineteenth century inventor named Joseph Fober.
So one of my main sources here is just generally
a good source on the history of speech synthesis and
talking machines. It was a book chapter in the Rutledge
(26:44):
Handbook of Phonetics from twenty nineteen by an author named
Brad H. Story, who is part of the faculty of
the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at the
University of Arizona. And Story, in this chapter traces the
history of speech synthesis from the mechanical methods of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the digital techniques of the present.
(27:07):
So it's the whole sort of modern arc of these machines.
But the thing I really want to focus in on
here now is this machine that I mentioned a minute ago,
by the nineteenth century German inventor Joseph Fober. This features
heavily at the beginning of stories chapter here. So this
machine was at various different times called the Marvelous Talking Machine.
(27:30):
You got a hyphen between talking machine and also the
euphonia from the Greek meaning good sound or sweet sound.
We'll see about that as we as we go on.
Robi included one illustration of the machine for you to
look at here. I think this may have been from
some kind of promotional material when this machine was featured
in an exhibit that I'll describe in a bit.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
I love it in part because right there is this
angelic human face like right there on the machine, seemingly
as decoration or maybe tribute. I'm not sure, but I'm
not sure if it's actually necessary to the mechanics of
the device.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Here, I think it sort of is. I'll explain so.
Story introduces Fober's machine through the eyes of another inventor
and scientist of the day named Joseph Henry. A different Joseph,
a researcher on electromagnetic induction and also the inaugural secretary
of the Smithsonian Institution. Henry encountered Fober's Marvelous Talking Machine
(28:34):
at a private exhibition in Philadelphia on December twentieth, eighteen
forty five, and he described the demonstration in a letter
to a colleague named H. M. Alexander. So we have
contemporaneous notes on what it was doing and what it
looked like in this private demonstration. So here's how it worked.
It was controlled by an operator via a mainly by
(29:00):
foot pedals and a keyboard, essentially just like an organ,
like a chamber organ, and in fact the device could
in some ways be considered a modified organ. So you
had a foot pedal that operated a bellows and that
would supply airflow to the whole system, and the bellows
pumped air through an artificial larynx that had vocal cords
(29:22):
that were in this source said to be made of
rubber and these so this artificial glottis or artificial vocal
cords would vibrate to produce the fundamental sound of the
machine's voice when air was flowing through them. And then
you had sixteen keys on the keyboard which were connected
by strings and levers to the various components that controlled
(29:47):
the shaping of that sound of that, you know, the
resonating sound from that airflow through the glottis into speech.
One of the interesting things is, as we've been saying,
this device actually had a face, so the face was
made of carved wood, essentially a large doll head, but
it had a hinged jaw, so maybe you should think
of it more like a ventriloquist dummy. You're loving this,
(30:09):
aren't you, Yeah, Night of the Living dummy. But it
can actually speak, And so inside the dummy's mouth there
was an ivory tongue that could be moved around inside
the oral cavity to control the shape of the resonating chamber.
And by controlling these different elements like the mouth and
(30:30):
the tongue and all that with the keys on the keyboard,
it quote imposed time varying changes to the air cavity
appropriate for generating apparently convincing renditions of connected speech. So
it may not have sounded perfect or even pleasant, but
apparently people in the room could understand what the machine
(30:53):
was saying when Fober operated it.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So this is.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Eighteen forty five and the machine is speaking intelligible words.
Henry in this letter compares it favorably to a different
talking machine, one he had seen years before. This was
one of the ones you mentioned, Rob, the one built
by the English scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone. Again, the
telegraph guy Wheatstone's talking machine was capable of being understood
(31:18):
for the set of words it could produce, but Fober's
machine was far superior because its speech repertoire was infinitely variable,
so he could speak whole sentences, and those sentences could
contain any words and any sounds you wanted, as long
as they were in one of the covered languages. Obviously
it couldn't do, you know, like tonal languages or like
(31:41):
speak Mandarin or something, but it seems like mainly it
was speaking German and English. It was said at the
time that it could speak any European language. Now, I
think one thing that's really worth noting here is that
if you imagine how a machine like this would work,
the success of the performance would depend heavily on the
skill of the operator, since the speech patterns are not
(32:04):
like programmed, and you know, it's not sort of expressed automatically,
but expressed in real time by the player operating the
bellows and the keys. And I think also there were
some screws and stuff that would manipulate pitch and things
like that, So you have to play this just like
you would play a musical instrument. So different players using
(32:26):
the same machine would probably produce fairly different sounding speech,
even if they had memorized which keys corresponded to which
phonetic units. So nobody I've read says this, but you know,
I'm kind of picturing Fober as a sort of phantom
of the opera at the at the organ keyboard. You know,
he's not just like pressing the keys, but giving a
real passionate and dramatic performance when somebody sells it. Ye yeah,
(32:51):
make it say Como tale vu or whatever. It also
sang songs, by the way. I'll get into that in
a minute. But I was wondering, what what did what
did people asking, you know, what's the equivalent in eighteen
forty five of yelling out, you know, play Freebird? And
I was thinking, maybe it's people are yelling for Tipicanu
and Tyler too.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
So an interesting detail that story includes in this chapter
is that this was not the first time Fober had
built a talking machine. In fact, this was not the
first time Fober had built this exact talking machine. There
was an earlier version of it that was destroyed by
Fober himself. Quote in a bout of depression and intoxication.
(33:30):
I should say that nearly every source I read on
Fober mentions something about him being disheveled or even haunted,
obsessed with his machine, and generally emotionally unwell or at
the very least having a really rough time a lot
of the time. Multiple writers describe him in terms containing
a lot of pity. But so, it took Fober apparently
(33:54):
twenty years to perfect the first version of the machine,
the one that he drunkenly destroyed, but he was able
to recreate the second version within a year of that.
And this kind of suggests to me the possibility that
the original creation of the machine may have really been
a project of fundamental research about phonetics more than it
(34:15):
was about engineering. And so once he had the knowledge
in hand of how each sound was produced, like what
the shape of the oral cavity, you know, how that
corresponded to the sounds, recreating the machine itself might have
been a relatively simple proposition. Is really what you needed
was the knowledge about how phonetics correspond to physical shapes.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah, And if he had that, and certainly if he
had notes on the matter and his designs recorded, it
would be easier to come back and reproduce that. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
So Joseph Henry's letter about Fober's talking machine demonstration. It
also includes speculation about the uses to which a machine
like this could be put. One interesting idea he has is,
what if you could take a spoken message at one
location and code that spoken message into inputs on this
(35:07):
keyboard on this machine, and then, through electromagnetic means, transmit
those keystrokes across wires to a totally separate second location,
and then those electrical signals could operate the speech organs
of the doll faced machine. In the second location. You
would essentially be transmitting speech itself across great distance. Notable
(35:32):
that Henry's idea here is roughly thirty years before Alexander
Graham Bell demonstrates the principle of the telephone. But there
is a very important difference, which is that while Bell's
telephone and these are stories words here quote transmitted an
electrical analog of the speech pressure wave. Henry's description alluded
to representing speech in compressed form based on slowly varying
(35:57):
movements of the operator's hands, fingers, and feet as they
formed the keystroke sequences required to produce an utterance, a
signal processing technique that would not be implemented into telephone
transmission systems for nearly another century. So the interesting thing
about Henry here is that he's not just imagining converting
the sound of a voice into an impulse that travels
(36:20):
along the wire. He's imagining a coding process. It's put
into code for the transmission and then decoded by the
machine at the other end.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
I can't help but try to imagine this alternate past
in which instead of early telephones, people all had this
weird cherub head mounted on the wall that then speaks
to you in this I'm assumed slightly haunting voice. Oh.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
I'll get to the haunting voice in a second, but anyway,
story flags it as historically significant that this one invention
had both succeeded in producing generally intelligible synthetic speech to
people in the room with it, and it had inspired
at least one onlooker to start considering ideas for the
electrical transmission of low bandwidth speech from one place to another.
(37:10):
But neither of these possibilities really went anywhere. Henry did
not devote any more effort to musing about the electrical transmission,
and Fober's machine ended up being a circus side show
almost literally. So after this, Fober needed money, and beginning
in eighteen forty six, to get money, he signed on
(37:32):
to demonstrate his machine for P. T. Barnum. Gotta have
something for everybody, even people who want a talking doll
head operated by a disheveled German organ master. So Fober
committed to exhibit the marvelous Speaking Machine for Barnum at
the Egyptian Hall in London. This was like a general
(37:52):
exhibition hall in Piccadilly which hosted all kinds of shows,
but I think, especially in the latter part of the
nineteenth century, it was known for showing like a lot
of Mountebanks and fraudulent spiritualist demonstrators. Yeah, I'll reveal to
you that you're actually a reincarnation of Cleopatra.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Lucky you.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
But by noting that that's just a random thing, I'm
not trying to cast dispersions on Fober because I want
to stress that it seems totally clear that Fober was
no con artist. As best we can tell, his machine
really did work, and when played correctly, it did really
speak original sentences that people could, for the most part understand. Though,
(38:34):
one thing that emerges from reading descriptions of this is
that coding intelligible information and sounding like speech are two
completely different things. So it seems that a lot of
people could tell what the machine was saying, but still
they were not very impressed by what they heard. And
(38:55):
I found a spectacularly evocative description of what the machine
was like are recorded in a book called Instruments and
the Imagination by Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman,
Princeton University Press, nineteen ninety nine. But the main thing
here is that they're quoting a person who saw the
machine in person in eighteen forty six, I believe, and
(39:17):
then wrote about it in a memoir. But generally the
authors here they note that there were like some satirical
articles making reference to Faber's machine, suggesting, for example, that
it could be used to replace the speaker of the
House of Commons. Yuk yah, those wacky politicians. But then
they well, they do kind of make a funny point. Actually,
they say, like you could just program it to say
(39:39):
order order at ten minute intervals.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Well that's pretty good, that's funny today.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Yeah. But anyway, then there's a part of the book
where they're including this evocative written account which is from
a London theater manager named John Hollingshead who saw this
machine in person when he was nineteen years old and
then wrote about it in a memoirs or some book.
But anyway, this is hallings Head's account. The exhibitor, Professor Fober,
(40:08):
was a sad faced man, dressed in respectable, well worn
clothes that were soiled by contact with tools, wood and machinery.
The room looked like a laboratory and workshop, which it was.
The professor was not too clean, and his hair and
beard sadly wanted the attention of a barber. I have
no doubt that he slept in the same room as
(40:30):
his figure, his scientific Frankenstein Monster.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Note.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
I guess the novel would have only been a few
decades old at this time.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Yeah, yeah, eighteen eighteen on Frankenstein there.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
Yeah, sorry going on with Halling's head, and I felt
the secret influence of an idea that the two were
destined to live and die together.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Oh my god, this is those pretty strong words. Yes.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
The professor, with a slight German accent, put his wonderful
toy in motion. He explained its action. It was not
necessary to prove the absence of deception one keyboard touched
by the professor, produced words which slowly and deliberately, in
a hoarse, sepulchral voice, came from the mouth of the figure,
as if from the depths of a tomb. It wanted
(41:17):
little imagination to make the very few visitors believe that
the figure contained an imprisoned human or half human being
bound to speak slowly when tormented by the unseen power outside.
No one thought for a moment that they were being
fooled by a second edition of the Invisible Girl fraud.
(41:38):
And by the way, the reference to the Invisible Girl fraud,
I believe is about the many fake machines and fake
automata that were actually worked by having a human hidden
inside operating it. But going on, so Holling said, says,
nobody thought that there was an invisible girl operating. This
as clear, this is real. He goes on. There were truth,
laborious invention, and good faith in every part of the
(42:01):
melancholy room. As a crowning display, the head sang a
sepulchral version of God Save the Queen, which suggested, inevitably,
God save the inventor. This extraordinary effect was achieved by
the professor working two keyboards, one for the words and
one for the music. Never probably before or since, has
(42:22):
the national anthem been so sung, sadder and wiser. I
and the few visitors crept slowly from the place, leaving
the Professor with his one and only treasure, his child
of infinite labor and unmeasurable sorrow.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Oh wow, that is a lot. I mean, obviously he
lays it on really thick about the sadness of the
inventor here. And then also there's the ideas like this
was no hoax, this was real and it was depressing.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Yeah, it's a weird mix of like like pity but
real admiration, you know that, Like, there's something beautiful and
honest and true about this machine and his devotion to
it and the genius it took to create it. But
also it makes everybody feel bad and nobody wants to
look at it or listen to it, and everybody leaves
(43:11):
feeling depressed. YEA, something about that struck me as actually
quite poignant and meaningful. Maybe we can come back to
that in a minute, but I did want to flag
that there was one notable visitor who, coming back to
the Invisible Girl suspicion, he did at first suspect fraud,
and that was the Duke of Wellington. I was reading
(43:32):
about this in a book called The Shows of London
by Richard Daniel Atlick, and at Lick recounts that Wellington,
when he first went to the demonstration, he was so
impressed by Faber's speaking machine that he asked to be
allowed to touch the keys with his own fingers, you know,
so he could see that it was genuine. And then
(43:52):
he did confirm that it was genuine, and then he
insisted that he'd be taught how to use it. So
Fober taught the Duke to play the machine in both
German and English, and Wellington did get it like he could.
He could make it speak sentences in German and English,
and he was amazed, writing in the visitor's log of
the exhibit that the speaking machine, or the Euphonia, was
(44:15):
quote an extraordinary production of mechanical genius. Faber's machine also
got rave reviews in The Times, in the Illustrated London News.
A lot of people like looked at it and they
(44:37):
thought that, like, yeah, this is a work of genius.
It's incredible that he's done this. But at the same time,
audiences really were not into it. Barnum himself noticed that
Fober's machine was not attracting crowds, it was not selling
tickets and not generating revenue, and so eventually he took
Fober's machine out of the Egyptian Hall in Life, London
(45:00):
and added it to a traveling exhibit that went around
the English countryside doing performances. And from here Faber himself
seems to kind of disappear from the historical record. Some
sources indicate that he may have died by suicide during
this period, though that isn't known for sure. But after
historical sources stopped mentioning Faber himself, they still make references
(45:23):
to his machine, reading from story here quote. Although his
talking machine continued to make side show like appearances in
Europe and North America over the next thirty years. It
seems a relative, perhaps a niece or nephew, may have
inherited the machine and performed with it to generate income.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
So maybe, no matter whatever happened to him, maybe a
relative with a little more showmanship like stepped in and
was able to make at least some sort of an
income off of it.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
Yes, But then again, like I'm struck by the strange
ironic sadness of this, this was actually a scientifically significant invention,
like he had done something kind of amazing, but it
just never really went anywhere under his mastery. And then yeah,
maybe a relative was a better Carnival Barker essentially to
(46:15):
perform with the machine and make some money off of it.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
I mean, it reminds me of so many advancements in
say robotics that we've seen over the years, where oftentimes,
you know, to a certain extent, unfairly, they'll just be
one little clip of it that goes viral and people
react to be it some sort of you know, human
likeness with facial features that seem to be moving or
(46:39):
operating in an uncanny way, or something like the various
dog robots from Boston Dynamics that are very impressive but
also maybe interpreted as being a bit creepy. And so
even though they are these, you know, they are often
examples of a real impressive technological advancement. Setting a side
(47:00):
actual applications, you can have a situation where something like
that is not as comforting, not as entertaining as say
an act of puppetry or even an act of just
outright well, maybe not fraud, but say a robot or
a costume depicting a robot maybe ultimately maybe more reassuring,
(47:23):
maybe more fun compared to the actual thing.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
Well yeah, which may which may just be fun or
may in fact be fraud, depending on what exactly they're
saying about it. Yeah, but this is a great point
and it brings me to I just wanted to mention
a few of the the general notes about the history
of speech synthesis from the end of this this book
chapter by Brad's story Story writs that, you know, while
(47:47):
there are technological use cases for speech synthesizers, we've you know,
we've got a number of them operating in consumer technology today,
and even before you had you know, personal digitalist stunts
and stuff, there would be use cases for speech synthesizers,
for example, people who have a disability that makes it
difficult or impossible for them to speak. Another one is
(48:11):
that apparently this was actually used by the Allies in
World War Two. There were some forms of speech synthesis
that would allow sort of covert coded transmissions of something
like a phone call, So you could have a phone
call between like FDR and Winston Churchill. It's not really
a phone call. It's like a transmitted synthesized bit of speech,
(48:32):
and so it's very secure, but it doesn't sound like
the person talking. It sounds maybe more like the euphonia,
kind of robotic and unnatural and maybe making the president's
giggle a bit a president Prime minister. But anyway, So
what story says is that a large number of these
systems have actually been primarily used as research tools, as
(48:55):
scientific tools for understanding the nature of human speech. I
trying to reproduce human speech and failing at it, that
we come closer to understanding how speech actually works in
the human body. But the second general observation that I
thought is interesting, and this seems to be very much
(49:15):
reflected in the Fober's machine example. It is much easier
to create a machine that can speak intelligibly than one
that can speak naturally. So that indicates that when we talk,
there's actually more than one thing going on. Yes, we
are conveying mental information coded in words, and the substance
(49:38):
of that coding is phonetic. It's a series of sounds.
But of course, you know, the ironic thing to people
who were used to thinking about words as text is
that the phonetic core of language long predates writing, so
like the written text of a word is a visual
code for the sound of the word, which is the
code for its meaning. But anyway, so machines for hundred
(50:00):
of yours have been able to produce more or less
intelligible phonetic code. They can speak words, and people can
understand what the words are supposed to be. But it
doesn't necessarily mean that people perceive these machines as speaking,
because there's another important quality to speech that was not
(50:20):
really captured by these early machines, and you could argue
is still somewhat lacking in the best speech synthesis of today,
and that is the natural character of continuous speech. These
machines always produce speech that sounded stilted, unreal, alien. It
was never something that would make you feel like you
were actually being talked to, as much as sort of
(50:42):
receiving a weird alien code in your language. And here
I just want to read from the stories chapter quote.
As a result, synthesis often presents itself as an oral
caricature that can be perceived as an unnatural in some
times amusing rendition of a desired utterance or speech sound.
(51:04):
It is particularly unique to phonetics and speech science that
the models used as tools to understand the scientific aspects
of a complex system produce a signal intended to be
heard as if it were a human. As such, the
quality of a speech synthesis can be rather harshly judged
because the model on which it is based has not
(51:27):
accounted for the myriad of subtle variations and details that
combine in natural human speech. So to paraphrase, speech is
so much more than just the words, And even if
you can get the words right, there's still something that
is that is lacking and is going to take a
lot of work to try to capture.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Yeah, this is fascinating to think about, and especially given
what you mentioned earlier about it's the importance of speech
the synthesizer technology to aid people who cannot speak or
have lost ability to speak. You know, I gave probably
one of the most famous, if not the most famous
examples of this is, of course, the speech synthesizer used
(52:09):
by theoretical Stephen Hawking. Like one of the interesting things
about his story with it, as I remember, is that
just me mentioning it, you can probably sort of hear
the voice the synthesized voice of Stephen Hawking in your head.
And I know that at some point like that was
you know, an early system he got there, and later
(52:30):
on in life he had he could have switched the
voice up, he could have changed the voice and and
I'm assuming could have maybe improved upon it, but by
that point he felt that this was his voice. You know,
you can't switch it up. You know, this is this
is how I speak, and this is how I hear myself.
So I always found that that interesting, and especially when
and then you can compare that to some other cases,
(52:51):
like you know, film credit Roger Ebert late in life,
you know, you could no longer speak, but had I
think they had a more robust system put together based
on samples of you know, the great catalog of his
own recorded speeches and reviews and so forth that they
could draw upon. And then looking into the future, you
have situations like James Earl Jones's Darth Vader voice, that
(53:14):
being you know, sort of archived and prepared for so
that in the future you can you can basically have
like a machine synthesized version of that voice that will
stand in as a sort of one to one replication
of what James Earl Jones did in life with the
(53:34):
voice acting.
Speaker 3 (53:36):
Or at least so the proponents of the technology would say,
I'm sure there would be critics who would say, it's
never going to be a one to one.
Speaker 1 (53:42):
Right, right, And then of course there's also the argument,
specifically with only with Darth Vader. Here am I discussing this,
but obviously the case can be made that like, well,
we shouldn't reproduce, you know, deceased actors' voices to continue
a fictional role. We should employ new living actors and
existing living voice actors who can do the voice. I
(54:04):
think with Darth Vader in particular, you could make a
strong case for that because there are other voice actors
who do officially voice act that character and do a
great job with it. What does it mean if that
individual's job is potentially taken by this sort of machine
likeness of that voice that is authorized based on the
(54:26):
voice of a you know, of a retired or in
some cases you know, deceased individual.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
Well, we're going a little off topic now, but I
will say that I stand by what I've said before,
which is I'm firmly in the camp that I prefer
recasting with a different actor, as opposed to using technology
to try to synthesize the voice or appearance of an
actor who, for whatever reason cannot be present. Right, people
have been recasting the same role with different actors for decades.
(54:54):
That happens all the time. Like, what's the problem with it?
Speaker 1 (54:57):
Yeah? I agree? I agree? But in in some cases,
is it possible that a role that's been established by
by a living actor could not be just masterfully redone
by a clunky machine with the face of a cherub,
that is, that is manipulated by a sad German man
(55:19):
who needs a haircut. I think there's some potential there,
Like I don't know the next James Bond.
Speaker 3 (55:24):
Maybe this is the only film genre I'm interested in
from now on. Yeah, high tension espionage movies starring the euphonia.
Speaker 1 (55:34):
So there you have it. The machine speaks. Obviously, we'd
love to hear from everyone out there if you have
thoughts on all of this, and certainly anyone out there
who has you know, direct experience with speech synthesizer technology
for one use or another. Right in, we would love
to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (55:49):
Just a reminder, I just the speech synthesis or speech
synthesizer is one of the hardest pairs of words to enunciate,
and I've had to say it so many times in
this episode. I just want to be recognized, especially for
the times I probably did it wrong.
Speaker 1 (56:06):
Yes, well it's easy for the babyface machines that yeah.
So at any rate. Yeah. If you want to listen
to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you
will find them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
podcast feed with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Mondays we do a listener mail, Wednesdays we do a
short form artufactor monster fact, and then on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (56:27):
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (56:48):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and Hey it's Saturday. It's time to venture
into the vault once more for one of our core
episodes from the past. This is going to be The
Machine Speaks, Originally published on six twenty nine, twenty twenty three.
We really hope you enjoy this one. It's a journey
(00:27):
through everything from ancient tales of artifice and wizardry to
the early breakthroughs in speech synthesis technology. Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick, and today we're going
to be talking about some early voice synthesis machines. Rob
I actually got interested in this topic because last week,
when we were watching the Weird House Cinema movie The
Black Hole, I was thinking about Roddy McDowell's voice when
he's doing a voice for the robot character who shares
(01:16):
a lot of proverbs with the human characters. And I
kept listening to his line delivery and I couldn't decide
if he was trying to do quote robot voice or not.
He seemed to kind of dip in and out of it.
You know what I mean when I say robot voice,
where a character's playing a robot and they say things
like this, Well.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Of course I know what you are talking about, Joe.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
I got kind of interested in the history of robot voice.
I was like, where does that come from? And I
was digging around a little. I'm sure there is a
good answer on that, but I don't know. My short
search didn't really turn up anything interesting, but it did
lead me indirectly to what we're talking about today, which is,
of course, we have the voice synthesis systems that that
(02:00):
are largely digital today. Before that, you had a lot
of electrical and electro mechanical systems for synthesizing human voices.
But actually there is an even earlier generation, which are
the purely mechanical voice synthesizers before electricity even came into
the picture. And that is what really stole my heart,
(02:21):
especially one particular machine of this type that I'm going
to talk about in the second half of this episode.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
I think, yeah, this is a fascinating topic, in part
because look at it. Look at where we are now,
right it's easy today in our Internet age for just
the average Internet user to engage with various chatbots and
generative AI, text to speech and so forth. And so
we're able to interact with an artifact, a thing that
(02:47):
reflects human will, that has been designed to do key
and telling things that have long been the hallmarks of
human activity, artistic generation, creative writing and conversation, or especially speech.
And of course it's you know, it's easy nowadays to
do that, right, to transform into audible or even video
content what is either written by human or or created
(03:11):
with some sort of a chat bot machine. And the
results may be amusing, they may may be disastrous. But
we're in this age where the idea of the machine
speaking is not in and of itself groundbreaking, or at
least if it is groundbreaking, or if it's amazing, it's
that it's a lower level of amazement compared to previous ages.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Well, as you say, it's very integrated into modern technology.
So there's you know, Siri and Alexa, all these like
home devices that speak, GPS devices for the car, you know,
that speak to you, but almost all of them are
still the subject of amusement if you actually pay attention
to what the voice sounds like, you know, like reading
emotions into the voice that's telling you what to do
(03:54):
as you're driving. That always makes me laugh because it
always seems a little bit annoyed.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, yeah, what's series whole deal that sort of thing, right?
You know. The other interesting angle on all of this
is that are modern technological advancements here, or even some
of the historic technological advancements like they are kind of
the echo of a more ancient longing for this sort
of thing. It connects to something that's just fascinated us
(04:25):
for a long time, the idea generally of non human
entities engaging in speech. And you could you could go
absolutely wild chasing down the various divisions of this, right,
the various myths, legends, and traditions concerning the speech of animals, plants,
inorganic materials, supernatural entities, you know, voices seemingly internal but
(04:47):
also external to our individual experience.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Though I would say there is an interesting thing about
machines or human or automata or human artifacts in general
when compared to imagining an animal speaker or any other
usually not speaking things starting to speak, which is, if
you're talking about a machine that does it. That means
somebody has to make that machine and somebody has to
(05:10):
work that machine, and it kind of reminds me of
the idea of grammar in language. You know, the interesting
thing about grammar is that when we use language, we
all use grammar, so we have an intuitive grasp of
the rules of grammar, but without serious study, people can't
actually tell you what those rules are. And so, like,
you know, that had to be in a sense a
(05:31):
science to back engineer the rules of grammar that we
use intuitively to like make them systematic and you know,
actually discover what those rules are. The same thing could
be said about the phonetic rules that produce the intelligible speech.
We can all do it if we can speak, but
we don't necessarily understand what the individual physical properties of
(05:54):
a word are, and so we wouldn't necessarily know how
to make that same word come out of a machine.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, there are all these things that you have to
deconstruct before you can attempt to reproduce it artificially. And
we see that time and time again with in robotics,
for example. You know, things that we take for granted
concerning human movement, just about anything else you could imagine
it becomes so much more difficult to try and reproduce
that you've got to understand what it actually is on
(06:22):
an entirely new level.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
First, Now, I am to understand that before anybody actually
made a machine that could approximate or synthesize a human
voice and produce intelligible speech, people were thinking about this
as a concept.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah yeah, and this is not surprising. You know, this
is kind of the meat of science fiction. Right before
we can do it, we dream of it one way
or another, no matter what our exact grasp of science
happens to be. It always reminds me of that line
in William Gibson's Neuromancer where the character has made a deal,
(06:57):
a pact with a powerful AI, and it's pointed out like,
this is the sort of thing that in you know,
centuries ago, people only dreamed of making a deal with
a devil, and now we've made it possible through our
ingenuity and invention.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Congratulations.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah, so so yeah. Narrowing down here into generally the
realm of alleged human creations that through at least partial technology,
but also sometimes wizardry and alchemy and other things that
are kind of like you know, bunched in there together
(07:33):
with with actual technology to create some sort of a
device capable of speech. And then there are some also
some related things that are tied in there as well.
And a lot of it comes down to the idea
of a head, an artificial head that speaks.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
I found something so loaded and revealing about that. As
a fact, the history of these machines, so many of
them had fa whether real or imagined, These machines, so
many of them early on had heads or faces, so
like it wouldn't just be a speaker like you would
have today, that's you know, it's just a mechanical device
for making the sound. It's like that the presence of
(08:13):
a head or a face was considered important or at
least desirable.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah, and I wondered to what extent part of it
is just an echo of these earlier ideas. So going
to run through a few of these here. One of
the most famous, mainly from a literary tradition, as we'll
discuss here, is the idea of the brazen head. And
ultimately I guess there's more than one brazen head. We
can say brazen heads artificial heads that could speak. There's
(08:42):
a basically a lot of these stories concerned thirteenth century
English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, who's come up
on the show before, though this particular version of the
story doesn't seem to emerge until the sixteenth century, and
it does so within the works of contemporary drama.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I think we talked about Roger Bacon at length in
an episode we did about the invention of fireworks, which
may come back and feature again in the feed soon.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah, yeah, I believe you're right. Yeah. I think Bacon
did come up in that he had a reputation as
not only a very learned man in both natural philosophy
and theology, and I should drive home definitely existed. I
don't think there's any doubt that there was a Roger Bacon.
But then there are all these other stories that he
was also potentially a wizard who was capable of producing
(09:32):
fabulous automata, either through amazing feats of clockwork ingenuity that
I think many would say was ultimately, you know, impossible
during his time period, or failing that, he was into
alchemy and of course dark dank necromancy.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
I think the way I conceive of Roger Bacon is
that he of course was a real figure. He was
of great intellectual note and significance, but much about his
sort of general reputation is kind of legendary, if that
makes sense. I mean, there are many things we know
about him that are true, but there's also just sort
of an aura or a vibe about him that is
(10:12):
not really based in reality.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah, I mean, he becomes a character in literature, especially
in these accounts, so you can you can sort of
look at the different phases like historic individual ideas and
you know, misunderstandings have said real life individual and then
eventually that echoes into the fictional version of the person.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Which that's the more like wizard version.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Yeah, yeah, And so there are a few different examples
of this. This was like a popular motif for a while.
There's a sixteenth century prose romance titled the Famous History
of Friar Bacon, and it tells of Bacon trying to
give a replica of a human head speech and having
to call in the devil for help. Cool. Other versions
of this tale describe it as an artificial head given
(10:55):
life by demons, which was capable of spontaneous speech and
of course telling the future I mean, what else would
you tell right right? Robert Greene's sixteen thirty play Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay mentions this several times, citing quote
Bacon's necromatic skill and heads of Brass that quote can
(11:18):
utter any voice. The idea that's exploring both of these
works is that Bacon wished to build a wall of
brass around Britain with the help of the Brazen Head.
He fails and the head explodes.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Why have I never heard this side? It as like
an early science fiction tale.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
I don't know. I'm probably not doing due diligence on
exactly what happens and everything, at least like saying, well,
in Star Wars, the bad guys make one planet to
blow up another planet, and then the planet they may
blows up. You know, That's that's really skipping over a
lot of the nuance. And so I think there's there's
inevitably more nuance here, but I just I didn't get
into it. Okay, So this idea of the satanic brasshead
(11:57):
of Roger Bacon persists despite the fact that there's no
indication that anything like this even created purely through technology
and not Satanic wizardry was part of Bacon's world. He
was interested in optics and certainly various instruments scientific instruments
of brass of the day. But there's no indication that
he ever built an artificial head and tried to get
it to speak.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Okay, so this is part of the wizard aura, not
part of his biography.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Right though, you know, we have to drive home to
is it possible that Roger Bacon, as a hobby did
what he could to create you know, I mean it's possible,
it's not. You know, I don't think he would have
gotten to speak. But there are various sort of ways
you could interpret this as having some basis in reality
that doesn't involve magic or superscience of the day. Okay, Now,
(12:43):
I went to my bookshelf and I pulled off my
dusty copy of Brewer's Dictionary Phrase and Fable. It provides
a little more insight on the legend. Quote. It was
said if Bacon heard it speak, he would succeed in
his projects, if not, he would fail. His familiar mile
was set to watch, and while Bacon slept, the head
spoke thrice. Time is half an hour later, it said,
(13:07):
time was in another half hour, it said times past
fell down and was broken to atoms to atoms to atoms. Yes,
surely Adams means something different here, Adams rights been discovered
at the time. I think it just means like small
parts or something.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Yeah, yes, yeah, that would be hilarious if it was
literally broken to atoms.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah. So I don't know if it if it works though,
it sounds like it's kind of an alarm clock that explodes.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Well, but I don't understand the difference between time was
and times pasted. They're both past tens.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Hm m. That's a good point. Time is, time was
times past. It seems like you would want the president
there somewhere, but yeah, that's that's that's what it allegedly said.
And you'll you'll find woodcuts that that have this this
motif on them as well.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Like it would it made more sense if it said
the three things where time will be, time is, time was,
but this seems more like time is, time was, time
was was.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Now. Brewers notes that reference to the references to the
Brazen Head are just common in literature, appearing frequently in
early romances but with Eastern origins, though it doesn't get
into that a lot elsewhere in the volume. It's also
noted that artificial heads that speak occur elsewhere as well.
(14:32):
And some of these are brazen heads, and some of
these are other things, but they're kind of I think
it's important to run through briefly some of these examples
because they kind of paint a picture of not only
some of these other ideas of artificial heads speaking and
telling the future, but related non technological non artifacts that
(14:52):
kind of help inform what we think technology can do. Okay, okay,
So one of them is a brazen head in the
possession of Pope Sylvester the Second in the tenth century,
which he also constructed, and misinterpretations of its utterances could
prove disastrous.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Oh, is this also believed to be Satanic in some way?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
I didn't go too deep on Satanic implications, but possibly, I.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Guess it would depend on if this legend is associated
with pro Pope Sylvester or anti Pope Sylvester sources.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Right, right, But you can definitely see that they're in
the head itself, regardless of what's supposed to be powering it.
Like this, it ties into two oracular traditions. You know,
the idea that here is this thing that can give
you cryptic wisdom if you have the wisdom to decipher
what it's telling you. Another example that's brought up in
Brewers is or the Colossi of Memnon, which we did
(15:48):
at least a whole I don't know, I can't remember
as one episode or multiple episodes, but we discussed this
on stuff to blow your mind. This is a fascinating
topic in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
This was basically, I think a statue or a pair
of statues, part of sort of a ruins complex that
was famous during in Roman Egypt as basically because it
would make sounds, and there were different theories about how
it made sounds and why.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Yeah, yeah, it seems like I think some said it
was capable of speech, but generally it's described as singing
or some sort of a note. And as we discussed,
while there are some I think unlikely theories regarding the
use of some sort of intentional sound generating device or devices,
it seems like a more likely explanation would have to
do with peculiarities of the stone as it heated in
(16:34):
the sun and then cooled at night. Anyway, go back
and listen to that episode if you want to know
about them. They have a pretty fascinating history.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
We'll remember better in the original.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yes, there's the head of Orpheus at Lesbos, predicting the
doom and death of Cyrus the Great. However, I believe
this is generally thought to be the actual head of
the hero Orpheus, after he was torn apart by the
main ads of Dionysus during a bacchanalia for the sin
of worshiping Apollo or having worshiped Apollo. I'm not sure
(17:06):
what the exact charge was, but still a prophetic, disembodied
head that still continues to speak. Brewers also mentions the
head of Minos brought by Odin to Scandinavia, which I
didn't know what to make of this, because Minos is
of course the mythical king of Crete that we've discussed
(17:26):
on the show before as well. I think the actual
figure in reference here might be Nimir, the god of
wisdom that is beheaded in the Aservaniir War. Odin claims
this head and it continues to speak secret wisdom. Again,
this is another one that's not a mechanical head. It's
the head of an actual defeated divine being that continues
(17:48):
to live on and to speak. There are tales of
Albertus Magnus having an earthen head, which during the thirteenth
century was said to speak and move until Thomas Aquinas
breaks sit by accident, and Magnus says, there goes the
labor of thirty years, because now it's broken. So I
don't know what to make of that one either completely.
(18:09):
But again we see this motif of a fabulous artificial
head that speaks, that manages to break one way or another,
either something fails, somebody knocks it over, or you know,
it explodes after you hit this nooze alarm twice. Then
there's Alexander's statue of Ascalapius, the Greek god of medicine,
that was said to speak, but Lucian wrote that the
(18:32):
sounds came via a concealed man who spoke through tubes.
So here's an example of some sort of of a creation.
I guess it depends on you look at either a
statue that isn't intended to speak, or through supernatural machinations speaks,
But according to Lucian, it's in neither of those. It's
(18:54):
just tubes and some guy like hiding in the bushes
speaking through the tubes, which is still clever and still technological,
but is trickery.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Nonetheless, I think the Lucian you're alluding to there is
Lucian of Samosada.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Is that right? I believe so, yes, yeah, this.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Is like this was an ancient satirist from Syria who
is quite hilarious and was kind of a skeptic debunker
of the of like the second century CE, which is
sort of strange, but he was in that mold and
he made like vicious mockery of people of all sorts
and different philosophies and stuff, and also wrote a satire
(19:32):
that some people have considered one of the earliest forms
of science fiction.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Now this also reminds me this is not I mean,
I guess it memory series. Maybe it did speak, But
there was of course the man faced Serpent God Glicon
of the second century that is often held up as
being a hoax, like it was actually a puppet according
to commentators. But I've always wondered what to make of that,
(19:59):
because it kind of if someone is performing puppetry and
people are having an emotional or even religious reaction to it,
it kind of depends how it's presented. Right, are you
presenting Glican the man face serpent as like, this is it?
This is an actual man face serpent God, Come take
a look that it's life. Is proof that he is real?
(20:20):
Or is it something else? Is it more like performance
or is it more like reinterpretation? You know, because you
have plenty of examples where people will carry out performances
in which people dress as divine and semi divine figures.
It's not supposed to be like, look at the proof here,
here is this hero on the stage. This means God
(20:40):
is real. Funny enough.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
I think Glicon was also written about by Lucian of
some Asada. But I guess the crucial question is like
is there an attempt at trickery or not? Like do
you want the audience to believe there is not somebody
behind the mask?
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Right? And you know that's interesting because that still kind
of applies to a lot of what's going on in
the world today with things like like chat box and
so forth. And you know, this idea that if we
know what is coming out of the box, what is
coming out of the artificial head? And you know, we
(21:17):
how are we interpreting it? And are we thinking there
is something there that is not. So it's like, on
what level is there trickery, and then there is like
interpretation of the trickery and so forth. But at any rate,
I think, you know, some of these examples they proved
that well before people could make any kind of a
mechanical thing, be it a head or not ahead that
(21:38):
could speak, we were still capable of dreaming about it.
And I think there's ample evidence that long before anyone
attempted to make a head that could talk through mechanical means,
individuals sought and sometimes found a voice emerging from disembodied heads,
either real ones the you know, the the remains of
human beings or other animals, or or likenesses of human heads,
(22:00):
either attached or detached from statues, and so forth. And
I think there's room between trickery and belief for the
suspension of belief and ritual as well to take into account.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
But of course, later on people would end up building real,
operable machines that were at least attempting to produce speech
that could be understood by humans.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
That's right, And this is where we get more into
the deconstruction of what human speech is, which in and
of itself is a whole subject, but there are key
moments where we see some major advancements being made here.
So another major entry to discuss in all of this
is the work of German born Russian doctor, physicist and
(22:50):
engineer Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, who lives seventeen twenty three through
seventeen ninety five. So he was a man of various
including the use of electricity and medicine, and at the
Saint Petersburg Science Academy at one point offered a prize
for advancements made in researching the mechanisms behind the vowels AEI, O,
(23:12):
and you in human speech. So in seventeen seventy nine
he presented his vowel organ to the university. The vowel
organ consisted of a series of resonators that produced vowel
like sounds on a constant pitch when excited by a read.
I found some illustrations of these basic resonators via the
(23:36):
UCL Psychology and Language Sciences Department. Here I also found
a website linked at this website where you can find
instructions for how to make your own resonators out of
plumbing supplies, which I found rather insightful. I did not
(23:56):
attempt it, but if you're into plumbing supplies and vowel sounds,
it seems like a natural craft choice.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
But the key insight being here that by changing the
shape of a physical resonating cavity, you can change the
sound of the vowel produced.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Right right. Another take on this. I was reading the
BBC Future article The Machines That Learned to Listen by
Kadia Musfych, and it describes these as resonance tubes connected
to organ pipes. So you know, this is not to
say that we have this is not on this like
the same level as some sort of imaginary brazen head
that's going to speak of its own and spout out,
(24:34):
spit out wisdom for you to interpret. This is about
just figuring out, you know, how these vowel sounds are
produced and reproducing them through a basic mechanical system. Musvich
also points out a few other key individuals in the
advancement of this technology. There's Wolfgang von Kimplin in Vienna,
who created a similar acoustic mechanical speech machine about ten
(24:57):
years after Kratzenstein. And then she also mentions English inventor
Charles Wheatstone, who would improve on this in the early
nineteenth century.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Charles Wheatstone. I'm going to mention him again in a minute,
but he's also notable because he was one of the
inventors of the first commercially successful form of the telegraph.
So we talked about him in our episode on your
mention of the telegraph. But when it comes to the
one you mentioned before, that von Kemplan's machine, this is
interesting because I read that while this machine was allegedly real,
(25:34):
it was a real attempt to make a machine that
would speak. Von Kemplan is now known for essentially being
a hoaxer because he tried to create other automata, including
a chess playing automaton that was actually a hoax. It
had a human inside it doing the moves, so it
was a fake robot.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Though as a fake still really impressive. It's interesting where
you get in like what sometimes you're wondering. You have
to wonder what the line knows between, you know, the
actual technological innovation and trickery. I mean, obviously it's deception,
and if you have a secret chamber in which there's
a whole person doing stuff, you know, that's a real
red flag there as well. But still the trickery is
(26:15):
pretty ingenious too.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean it takes skill to be
a good magician.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Anyway, this brings us to the example that I was
really excited to talk about in today's episode, which is
the speaking machine of a nineteenth century inventor named Joseph Fober.
So one of my main sources here is just generally
a good source on the history of speech synthesis and
talking machines. It was a book chapter in the Rutledge
(26:44):
Handbook of Phonetics from twenty nineteen by an author named
Brad H. Story, who is part of the faculty of
the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at the
University of Arizona. And Story, in this chapter traces the
history of speech synthesis from the mechanical methods of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the digital techniques of the present.
(27:07):
So it's the whole sort of modern arc of these machines.
But the thing I really want to focus in on
here now is this machine that I mentioned a minute ago,
by the nineteenth century German inventor Joseph Fober. This features
heavily at the beginning of stories chapter here. So this
machine was at various different times called the Marvelous Talking Machine.
(27:30):
You got a hyphen between talking machine and also the
euphonia from the Greek meaning good sound or sweet sound.
We'll see about that as we as we go on.
Robi included one illustration of the machine for you to
look at here. I think this may have been from
some kind of promotional material when this machine was featured
in an exhibit that I'll describe in a bit.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
I love it in part because right there is this
angelic human face like right there on the machine, seemingly
as decoration or maybe tribute. I'm not sure, but I'm
not sure if it's actually necessary to the mechanics of
the device.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Here, I think it sort of is. I'll explain so.
Story introduces Fober's machine through the eyes of another inventor
and scientist of the day named Joseph Henry. A different Joseph,
a researcher on electromagnetic induction and also the inaugural secretary
of the Smithsonian Institution. Henry encountered Fober's Marvelous Talking Machine
(28:34):
at a private exhibition in Philadelphia on December twentieth, eighteen
forty five, and he described the demonstration in a letter
to a colleague named H. M. Alexander. So we have
contemporaneous notes on what it was doing and what it
looked like in this private demonstration. So here's how it worked.
It was controlled by an operator via a mainly by
(29:00):
foot pedals and a keyboard, essentially just like an organ,
like a chamber organ, and in fact the device could
in some ways be considered a modified organ. So you
had a foot pedal that operated a bellows and that
would supply airflow to the whole system, and the bellows
pumped air through an artificial larynx that had vocal cords
(29:22):
that were in this source said to be made of
rubber and these so this artificial glottis or artificial vocal
cords would vibrate to produce the fundamental sound of the
machine's voice when air was flowing through them. And then
you had sixteen keys on the keyboard which were connected
by strings and levers to the various components that controlled
(29:47):
the shaping of that sound of that, you know, the
resonating sound from that airflow through the glottis into speech.
One of the interesting things is, as we've been saying,
this device actually had a face, so the face was
made of carved wood, essentially a large doll head, but
it had a hinged jaw, so maybe you should think
of it more like a ventriloquist dummy. You're loving this,
(30:09):
aren't you, Yeah, Night of the Living dummy. But it
can actually speak, And so inside the dummy's mouth there
was an ivory tongue that could be moved around inside
the oral cavity to control the shape of the resonating chamber.
And by controlling these different elements like the mouth and
(30:30):
the tongue and all that with the keys on the keyboard,
it quote imposed time varying changes to the air cavity
appropriate for generating apparently convincing renditions of connected speech. So
it may not have sounded perfect or even pleasant, but
apparently people in the room could understand what the machine
(30:53):
was saying when Fober operated it.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So this is.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Eighteen forty five and the machine is speaking intelligible words.
Henry in this letter compares it favorably to a different
talking machine, one he had seen years before. This was
one of the ones you mentioned, Rob, the one built
by the English scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone. Again, the
telegraph guy Wheatstone's talking machine was capable of being understood
(31:18):
for the set of words it could produce, but Fober's
machine was far superior because its speech repertoire was infinitely variable,
so he could speak whole sentences, and those sentences could
contain any words and any sounds you wanted, as long
as they were in one of the covered languages. Obviously
it couldn't do, you know, like tonal languages or like
(31:41):
speak Mandarin or something, but it seems like mainly it
was speaking German and English. It was said at the
time that it could speak any European language. Now, I
think one thing that's really worth noting here is that
if you imagine how a machine like this would work,
the success of the performance would depend heavily on the
skill of the operator, since the speech patterns are not
(32:04):
like programmed, and you know, it's not sort of expressed automatically,
but expressed in real time by the player operating the
bellows and the keys. And I think also there were
some screws and stuff that would manipulate pitch and things
like that, So you have to play this just like
you would play a musical instrument. So different players using
(32:26):
the same machine would probably produce fairly different sounding speech,
even if they had memorized which keys corresponded to which
phonetic units. So nobody I've read says this, but you know,
I'm kind of picturing Fober as a sort of phantom
of the opera at the at the organ keyboard. You know,
he's not just like pressing the keys, but giving a
real passionate and dramatic performance when somebody sells it. Ye yeah,
(32:51):
make it say Como tale vu or whatever. It also
sang songs, by the way. I'll get into that in
a minute. But I was wondering, what what did what
did people asking, you know, what's the equivalent in eighteen
forty five of yelling out, you know, play Freebird? And
I was thinking, maybe it's people are yelling for Tipicanu
and Tyler too.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
So an interesting detail that story includes in this chapter
is that this was not the first time Fober had
built a talking machine. In fact, this was not the
first time Fober had built this exact talking machine. There
was an earlier version of it that was destroyed by
Fober himself. Quote in a bout of depression and intoxication.
(33:30):
I should say that nearly every source I read on
Fober mentions something about him being disheveled or even haunted,
obsessed with his machine, and generally emotionally unwell or at
the very least having a really rough time a lot
of the time. Multiple writers describe him in terms containing
a lot of pity. But so, it took Fober apparently
(33:54):
twenty years to perfect the first version of the machine,
the one that he drunkenly destroyed, but he was able
to recreate the second version within a year of that.
And this kind of suggests to me the possibility that
the original creation of the machine may have really been
a project of fundamental research about phonetics more than it
(34:15):
was about engineering. And so once he had the knowledge
in hand of how each sound was produced, like what
the shape of the oral cavity, you know, how that
corresponded to the sounds, recreating the machine itself might have
been a relatively simple proposition. Is really what you needed
was the knowledge about how phonetics correspond to physical shapes.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah, And if he had that, and certainly if he
had notes on the matter and his designs recorded, it
would be easier to come back and reproduce that. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
So Joseph Henry's letter about Fober's talking machine demonstration. It
also includes speculation about the uses to which a machine
like this could be put. One interesting idea he has is,
what if you could take a spoken message at one
location and code that spoken message into inputs on this
(35:07):
keyboard on this machine, and then, through electromagnetic means, transmit
those keystrokes across wires to a totally separate second location,
and then those electrical signals could operate the speech organs
of the doll faced machine. In the second location. You
would essentially be transmitting speech itself across great distance. Notable
(35:32):
that Henry's idea here is roughly thirty years before Alexander
Graham Bell demonstrates the principle of the telephone. But there
is a very important difference, which is that while Bell's
telephone and these are stories words here quote transmitted an
electrical analog of the speech pressure wave. Henry's description alluded
to representing speech in compressed form based on slowly varying
(35:57):
movements of the operator's hands, fingers, and feet as they
formed the keystroke sequences required to produce an utterance, a
signal processing technique that would not be implemented into telephone
transmission systems for nearly another century. So the interesting thing
about Henry here is that he's not just imagining converting
the sound of a voice into an impulse that travels
(36:20):
along the wire. He's imagining a coding process. It's put
into code for the transmission and then decoded by the
machine at the other end.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
I can't help but try to imagine this alternate past
in which instead of early telephones, people all had this
weird cherub head mounted on the wall that then speaks
to you in this I'm assumed slightly haunting voice. Oh.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
I'll get to the haunting voice in a second, but anyway,
story flags it as historically significant that this one invention
had both succeeded in producing generally intelligible synthetic speech to
people in the room with it, and it had inspired
at least one onlooker to start considering ideas for the
electrical transmission of low bandwidth speech from one place to another.
(37:10):
But neither of these possibilities really went anywhere. Henry did
not devote any more effort to musing about the electrical transmission,
and Fober's machine ended up being a circus side show
almost literally. So after this, Fober needed money, and beginning
in eighteen forty six, to get money, he signed on
(37:32):
to demonstrate his machine for P. T. Barnum. Gotta have
something for everybody, even people who want a talking doll
head operated by a disheveled German organ master. So Fober
committed to exhibit the marvelous Speaking Machine for Barnum at
the Egyptian Hall in London. This was like a general
(37:52):
exhibition hall in Piccadilly which hosted all kinds of shows,
but I think, especially in the latter part of the
nineteenth century, it was known for showing like a lot
of Mountebanks and fraudulent spiritualist demonstrators. Yeah, I'll reveal to
you that you're actually a reincarnation of Cleopatra.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Lucky you.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
But by noting that that's just a random thing, I'm
not trying to cast dispersions on Fober because I want
to stress that it seems totally clear that Fober was
no con artist. As best we can tell, his machine
really did work, and when played correctly, it did really
speak original sentences that people could, for the most part understand. Though,
(38:34):
one thing that emerges from reading descriptions of this is
that coding intelligible information and sounding like speech are two
completely different things. So it seems that a lot of
people could tell what the machine was saying, but still
they were not very impressed by what they heard. And
(38:55):
I found a spectacularly evocative description of what the machine
was like are recorded in a book called Instruments and
the Imagination by Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman,
Princeton University Press, nineteen ninety nine. But the main thing
here is that they're quoting a person who saw the
machine in person in eighteen forty six, I believe, and
(39:17):
then wrote about it in a memoir. But generally the
authors here they note that there were like some satirical
articles making reference to Faber's machine, suggesting, for example, that
it could be used to replace the speaker of the
House of Commons. Yuk yah, those wacky politicians. But then
they well, they do kind of make a funny point. Actually,
they say, like you could just program it to say
(39:39):
order order at ten minute intervals.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Well that's pretty good, that's funny today.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Yeah. But anyway, then there's a part of the book
where they're including this evocative written account which is from
a London theater manager named John Hollingshead who saw this
machine in person when he was nineteen years old and
then wrote about it in a memoirs or some book.
But anyway, this is hallings Head's account. The exhibitor, Professor Fober,
(40:08):
was a sad faced man, dressed in respectable, well worn
clothes that were soiled by contact with tools, wood and machinery.
The room looked like a laboratory and workshop, which it was.
The professor was not too clean, and his hair and
beard sadly wanted the attention of a barber. I have
no doubt that he slept in the same room as
(40:30):
his figure, his scientific Frankenstein Monster.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Note.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
I guess the novel would have only been a few
decades old at this time.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Yeah, yeah, eighteen eighteen on Frankenstein there.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
Yeah, sorry going on with Halling's head, and I felt
the secret influence of an idea that the two were
destined to live and die together.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Oh my god, this is those pretty strong words. Yes.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
The professor, with a slight German accent, put his wonderful
toy in motion. He explained its action. It was not
necessary to prove the absence of deception one keyboard touched
by the professor, produced words which slowly and deliberately, in
a hoarse, sepulchral voice, came from the mouth of the figure,
as if from the depths of a tomb. It wanted
(41:17):
little imagination to make the very few visitors believe that
the figure contained an imprisoned human or half human being
bound to speak slowly when tormented by the unseen power outside.
No one thought for a moment that they were being
fooled by a second edition of the Invisible Girl fraud.
(41:38):
And by the way, the reference to the Invisible Girl fraud,
I believe is about the many fake machines and fake
automata that were actually worked by having a human hidden
inside operating it. But going on, so Holling said, says,
nobody thought that there was an invisible girl operating. This
as clear, this is real. He goes on. There were truth,
laborious invention, and good faith in every part of the
(42:01):
melancholy room. As a crowning display, the head sang a
sepulchral version of God Save the Queen, which suggested, inevitably,
God save the inventor. This extraordinary effect was achieved by
the professor working two keyboards, one for the words and
one for the music. Never probably before or since, has
(42:22):
the national anthem been so sung, sadder and wiser. I
and the few visitors crept slowly from the place, leaving
the Professor with his one and only treasure, his child
of infinite labor and unmeasurable sorrow.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Oh wow, that is a lot. I mean, obviously he
lays it on really thick about the sadness of the
inventor here. And then also there's the ideas like this
was no hoax, this was real and it was depressing.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Yeah, it's a weird mix of like like pity but
real admiration, you know that, Like, there's something beautiful and
honest and true about this machine and his devotion to
it and the genius it took to create it. But
also it makes everybody feel bad and nobody wants to
look at it or listen to it, and everybody leaves
(43:11):
feeling depressed. YEA, something about that struck me as actually
quite poignant and meaningful. Maybe we can come back to
that in a minute, but I did want to flag
that there was one notable visitor who, coming back to
the Invisible Girl suspicion, he did at first suspect fraud,
and that was the Duke of Wellington. I was reading
(43:32):
about this in a book called The Shows of London
by Richard Daniel Atlick, and at Lick recounts that Wellington,
when he first went to the demonstration, he was so
impressed by Faber's speaking machine that he asked to be
allowed to touch the keys with his own fingers, you know,
so he could see that it was genuine. And then
(43:52):
he did confirm that it was genuine, and then he
insisted that he'd be taught how to use it. So
Fober taught the Duke to play the machine in both
German and English, and Wellington did get it like he could.
He could make it speak sentences in German and English,
and he was amazed, writing in the visitor's log of
the exhibit that the speaking machine, or the Euphonia, was
(44:15):
quote an extraordinary production of mechanical genius. Faber's machine also
got rave reviews in The Times, in the Illustrated London News.
A lot of people like looked at it and they
(44:37):
thought that, like, yeah, this is a work of genius.
It's incredible that he's done this. But at the same time,
audiences really were not into it. Barnum himself noticed that
Fober's machine was not attracting crowds, it was not selling
tickets and not generating revenue, and so eventually he took
Fober's machine out of the Egyptian Hall in Life, London
(45:00):
and added it to a traveling exhibit that went around
the English countryside doing performances. And from here Faber himself
seems to kind of disappear from the historical record. Some
sources indicate that he may have died by suicide during
this period, though that isn't known for sure. But after
historical sources stopped mentioning Faber himself, they still make references
(45:23):
to his machine, reading from story here quote. Although his
talking machine continued to make side show like appearances in
Europe and North America over the next thirty years. It
seems a relative, perhaps a niece or nephew, may have
inherited the machine and performed with it to generate income.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
So maybe, no matter whatever happened to him, maybe a
relative with a little more showmanship like stepped in and
was able to make at least some sort of an
income off of it.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
Yes, But then again, like I'm struck by the strange
ironic sadness of this, this was actually a scientifically significant invention,
like he had done something kind of amazing, but it
just never really went anywhere under his mastery. And then yeah,
maybe a relative was a better Carnival Barker essentially to
(46:15):
perform with the machine and make some money off of it.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
I mean, it reminds me of so many advancements in
say robotics that we've seen over the years, where oftentimes,
you know, to a certain extent, unfairly, they'll just be
one little clip of it that goes viral and people
react to be it some sort of you know, human
likeness with facial features that seem to be moving or
(46:39):
operating in an uncanny way, or something like the various
dog robots from Boston Dynamics that are very impressive but
also maybe interpreted as being a bit creepy. And so
even though they are these, you know, they are often
examples of a real impressive technological advancement. Setting a side
(47:00):
actual applications, you can have a situation where something like
that is not as comforting, not as entertaining as say
an act of puppetry or even an act of just
outright well, maybe not fraud, but say a robot or
a costume depicting a robot maybe ultimately maybe more reassuring,
(47:23):
maybe more fun compared to the actual thing.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
Well yeah, which may which may just be fun or
may in fact be fraud, depending on what exactly they're
saying about it. Yeah, but this is a great point
and it brings me to I just wanted to mention
a few of the the general notes about the history
of speech synthesis from the end of this this book
chapter by Brad's story Story writs that, you know, while
(47:47):
there are technological use cases for speech synthesizers, we've you know,
we've got a number of them operating in consumer technology today,
and even before you had you know, personal digitalist stunts
and stuff, there would be use cases for speech synthesizers,
for example, people who have a disability that makes it
difficult or impossible for them to speak. Another one is
(48:11):
that apparently this was actually used by the Allies in
World War Two. There were some forms of speech synthesis
that would allow sort of covert coded transmissions of something
like a phone call, So you could have a phone
call between like FDR and Winston Churchill. It's not really
a phone call. It's like a transmitted synthesized bit of speech,
(48:32):
and so it's very secure, but it doesn't sound like
the person talking. It sounds maybe more like the euphonia,
kind of robotic and unnatural and maybe making the president's
giggle a bit a president Prime minister. But anyway, So
what story says is that a large number of these
systems have actually been primarily used as research tools, as
(48:55):
scientific tools for understanding the nature of human speech. I
trying to reproduce human speech and failing at it, that
we come closer to understanding how speech actually works in
the human body. But the second general observation that I
thought is interesting, and this seems to be very much
(49:15):
reflected in the Fober's machine example. It is much easier
to create a machine that can speak intelligibly than one
that can speak naturally. So that indicates that when we talk,
there's actually more than one thing going on. Yes, we
are conveying mental information coded in words, and the substance
(49:38):
of that coding is phonetic. It's a series of sounds.
But of course, you know, the ironic thing to people
who were used to thinking about words as text is
that the phonetic core of language long predates writing, so
like the written text of a word is a visual
code for the sound of the word, which is the
code for its meaning. But anyway, so machines for hundred
(50:00):
of yours have been able to produce more or less
intelligible phonetic code. They can speak words, and people can
understand what the words are supposed to be. But it
doesn't necessarily mean that people perceive these machines as speaking,
because there's another important quality to speech that was not
(50:20):
really captured by these early machines, and you could argue
is still somewhat lacking in the best speech synthesis of today,
and that is the natural character of continuous speech. These
machines always produce speech that sounded stilted, unreal, alien. It
was never something that would make you feel like you
were actually being talked to, as much as sort of
(50:42):
receiving a weird alien code in your language. And here
I just want to read from the stories chapter quote.
As a result, synthesis often presents itself as an oral
caricature that can be perceived as an unnatural in some
times amusing rendition of a desired utterance or speech sound.
(51:04):
It is particularly unique to phonetics and speech science that
the models used as tools to understand the scientific aspects
of a complex system produce a signal intended to be
heard as if it were a human. As such, the
quality of a speech synthesis can be rather harshly judged
because the model on which it is based has not
(51:27):
accounted for the myriad of subtle variations and details that
combine in natural human speech. So to paraphrase, speech is
so much more than just the words, And even if
you can get the words right, there's still something that
is that is lacking and is going to take a
lot of work to try to capture.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Yeah, this is fascinating to think about, and especially given
what you mentioned earlier about it's the importance of speech
the synthesizer technology to aid people who cannot speak or
have lost ability to speak. You know, I gave probably
one of the most famous, if not the most famous
examples of this is, of course, the speech synthesizer used
(52:09):
by theoretical Stephen Hawking. Like one of the interesting things
about his story with it, as I remember, is that
just me mentioning it, you can probably sort of hear
the voice the synthesized voice of Stephen Hawking in your head.
And I know that at some point like that was
you know, an early system he got there, and later
(52:30):
on in life he had he could have switched the
voice up, he could have changed the voice and and
I'm assuming could have maybe improved upon it, but by
that point he felt that this was his voice. You know,
you can't switch it up. You know, this is this
is how I speak, and this is how I hear myself.
So I always found that that interesting, and especially when
and then you can compare that to some other cases,
(52:51):
like you know, film credit Roger Ebert late in life,
you know, you could no longer speak, but had I
think they had a more robust system put together based
on samples of you know, the great catalog of his
own recorded speeches and reviews and so forth that they
could draw upon. And then looking into the future, you
have situations like James Earl Jones's Darth Vader voice, that
(53:14):
being you know, sort of archived and prepared for so
that in the future you can you can basically have
like a machine synthesized version of that voice that will
stand in as a sort of one to one replication
of what James Earl Jones did in life with the
(53:34):
voice acting.
Speaker 3 (53:36):
Or at least so the proponents of the technology would say,
I'm sure there would be critics who would say, it's
never going to be a one to one.
Speaker 1 (53:42):
Right, right, And then of course there's also the argument,
specifically with only with Darth Vader. Here am I discussing this,
but obviously the case can be made that like, well,
we shouldn't reproduce, you know, deceased actors' voices to continue
a fictional role. We should employ new living actors and
existing living voice actors who can do the voice. I
(54:04):
think with Darth Vader in particular, you could make a
strong case for that because there are other voice actors
who do officially voice act that character and do a
great job with it. What does it mean if that
individual's job is potentially taken by this sort of machine
likeness of that voice that is authorized based on the
(54:26):
voice of a you know, of a retired or in
some cases you know, deceased individual.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
Well, we're going a little off topic now, but I
will say that I stand by what I've said before,
which is I'm firmly in the camp that I prefer
recasting with a different actor, as opposed to using technology
to try to synthesize the voice or appearance of an
actor who, for whatever reason cannot be present. Right, people
have been recasting the same role with different actors for decades.
(54:54):
That happens all the time. Like, what's the problem with it?
Speaker 1 (54:57):
Yeah? I agree? I agree? But in in some cases,
is it possible that a role that's been established by
by a living actor could not be just masterfully redone
by a clunky machine with the face of a cherub,
that is, that is manipulated by a sad German man
(55:19):
who needs a haircut. I think there's some potential there,
Like I don't know the next James Bond.
Speaker 3 (55:24):
Maybe this is the only film genre I'm interested in
from now on. Yeah, high tension espionage movies starring the euphonia.
Speaker 1 (55:34):
So there you have it. The machine speaks. Obviously, we'd
love to hear from everyone out there if you have
thoughts on all of this, and certainly anyone out there
who has you know, direct experience with speech synthesizer technology
for one use or another. Right in, we would love
to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (55:49):
Just a reminder, I just the speech synthesis or speech
synthesizer is one of the hardest pairs of words to enunciate,
and I've had to say it so many times in
this episode. I just want to be recognized, especially for
the times I probably did it wrong.
Speaker 1 (56:06):
Yes, well it's easy for the babyface machines that yeah.
So at any rate. Yeah. If you want to listen
to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you
will find them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
podcast feed with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Mondays we do a listener mail, Wednesdays we do a
short form artufactor monster fact, and then on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (56:27):
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (56:48):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com