Computer Speech – Hee Saw Dhuh Kaet

Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs) D.H. Van Lenten

1963

Music/Sound

1 sound disc : analog, 33 ⅓ rpm, mono ; 7 in. (18 cm) + 1 stiff-card gate-fold sleeve (18 × 18 cm). Sleeve front printed in four colors with stylized ear, phoneme boxes, and yellow speech balloon; interior reverse carries 600-word technical note.

The Listening Room

Description

Computer Speech is the earliest known distributed recording of digital speech synthesis. Released in a press run of fewer than 5,000 copies as an educational giveaway for science teachers and speech-and-hearing courses, the 7-inch disc presents nine tracks of synthetic English produced by Bell Labs’ rule-based articulatory synthesizer. An announcer guides listeners through demonstrations of pitch, timing, and intelligibility, from the test sentence “He saw the cat” to the computer’s rendition of the 1892 popular song “Daisy Bell.” The final band contrasts the computer voice with a recording of human speech that had been digitally deconstructed and resynthesized, to highlight advances in digital audio technology.

Bell Labs was a leading site for research into computers and sound. Computer Speech was intended to popularize its findings and raise awareness about the research being conducted into electronic sound.

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