Mrs Helen Harper, of Jamaica, New York, had an unusual ability — she could play the human voice with her fingers.

It was 1939, and the world’s first electronic speech synthesiser had just been invented at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.  The Voder, as it was named, … Read the rest

The post Meet Siri’s Great-Grandfather, the Voder appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

A year ago, a new speech synthesis system called WaveNet was presented by Google’s DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company.  As its name suggests, WaveNet generates speech by using neural networks to predict what the sound wave of a sentence should look like.  I thought this was interesting because it’s such a counterintuitive way to produce speech sounds.

WaveNet in Action

In this … Read the rest

The post WaveNet: Micro-Managing the Way to Realistic Synthesised Speech appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

Here’s a novel idea from the King’s College Choir:

In the video, one of the choristers gets help hitting a high note by taking a breath from a large helium balloon. (Obligatory warning: it’s dangerous to try this at home.)  So… does this actually work?  Does inhaling helium really make your voice higher?

In an earlier post, we looked at how the pitch of your voice depends on … Read the rest

The post Why Inhaling Helium Makes You Sound Like a Chipmunk appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

Here’s a recording of a woman reciting a line from the Catalan poem La Vaca Cega:

Speech-female.wav by xserra / CC BY.

Suppose that you wanted to take the recording and change the quality of the voice — change it into a male-sounding voice, for instance.  How would you go about it?  I did this recently for an online audio processing course I took, … Read the rest

The post Digitally Transforming a Female Voice to a Male Voice appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

In a dimly-lit room in the back of London’s Egyptian Hall, a few curious people had gathered.  Each had paid a shilling for the privilege of seeing the object standing in the centre of the room.  A grotesque device it was — the mask of a woman’s face, framed in the fashionable ringlets of the day, … Read the rest

The post The Mechanical Talking Head: An Early Speech Synthesiser appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.