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fraud, powered by a chess-playing dwarf.
Some years later the British scientist Charles Wheatstone
created an improved model of the Kempelen machine,
which was later to capture the imagination of Alexander
Graham Bell – the inventor of the telephone. In 1863 Bell
produced his own ‘talking head’. The device could articulate
the sound ‘mama’ sufficiently clearly to cause a neighbour
to enquire after the baby’s welfare.
Perhaps it is unclear whether these experiments and
developments belong to the realm of science, technology,
music, magic, or public entertainment (Bell’s brother
Melville once took to the Edinburgh stage with a false beard
and foreign accent to demonstrate one machine), but all
these early attempts at speech synthesis arose from
attempts to reproduce the articulatory apparatus of a
human vocal tract, using bellows and resonating chambers.
It was not until after World War II, when the science of
acoustic analysis was more developed, that an alternative
approach of synthesising speech sounds directly became
possible. And it was not until the 1970s that synthesis of a
female voice was successfully achieved.
The state of the art today,
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which includes ‘speech
morphing’, allows the speaking and singing voices of
particular individuals to be mimicked by computers. Like
the discreet digital changes to photographs that can
remove and add objects or body parts to the finished
picture, the modern ‘speaking machines’ raise important
ethical questions: how much trust should we have in what
we hear? Do we have any rights to our own vocal
identity?
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the language machine
11
When destiny calls, have the confidence to answer
‘In 1876, Bell and Watson demonstrated their new device to Western Union, but the company’s executives
failed to see its potential. “Mr Bell,” they wrote to him, “after careful consideration of your invention, while it
is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities,” adding
that they saw no future for “an electrical toy”. … In the next twenty years … Bell’s telephone company,
renamed American Telephone and Telegraph, became the largest corporation in America, with stock worth
$1,000 a share. The Bell patent became the single most valuable patent in history .’ (Bryson, 1994)
Future scenarios
See pages 50 to 53
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’The evolution of human
intelligence keeps pace with the
evolution not only of language, but
of technologies supporting and
processing language.’
(O’Donnell, 1998)
Remember your reactions on
learning to use a word processor,
and seeing your words appear –
and disappear – on a monitor
screen? ‘The computer not only
made it easier for me to write; it
had also changed the very
substance of what I was writing,
and in that sense, I suspect, it had
an enormous effect on my
thinking.’ (Johnson, 1997)
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Voices form a part of our identity.
How then will language machines
change our speech – or thoughts?
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Copyright, 1999 The British Council. All rights reserved.