Bell Telephone Labs - Computer Speech. This recording contains samples of synthesized speech - speech artifically constructed from the basic building blocks of the English language. A machine which produces synthesized speech is callled, fittingly, a talking machine. There are many possible kinds of speech synthesizers or talking machines. Instead of building and testing a variety of them, scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories simulate their behaviour with a high-speed, general puropse computer. The computer is instructed (programmed) to accept in sequence on punched cards the names of the speech sounds which make up an English sentence. It then processes this information, in accordance with the linguistic rules governing the English language, and produces an output analogous to the output of the talking machine it is programmed to simulate. The talking machine simulated by the computer in this recording would normally be operated by continuosly feeding it a set of nine control signals. The signals correspond to voice pitch, voice loudness, lip opening and other speech variables. When every instant of sound is specified, and every variable accounted for, such a machine produces human-sounding speech.
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