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“LA Made” is a series exploring stories of bold Californian innovators and how they forever changed the lives of millions all over the world. Each season will unpack the untold and surprising stories behind some of the most exciting innovations that continue to influence our lives today. Season 3, "LA Made: The Other Moonshot," tells the story of three Black aerospace engineers in Los Angeles, who played a crucial role in America’s race to space, amid the civil unrest of the 1960s. When Joan ...
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Today we learn how computers learned to talk with Benjamin Lindquist, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture program. Ben is the author “The Art of Text to Speech,” which recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, and he’s currently writing a history of text-to-speech computing.
In this conversation, we explore:
- the fascinating backstory to HAL 9000, the speaking computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey
- 2001’s strong influence on computer science and the cultural reception of computers
- the weird technology of the first talking computers and their relationship to optical film soundtracks
- Louis Gerstman, the forgotten innovator who first made an IBM mainframe sing “Daisy Bell.”
- why the phonemic approach of Stephen Hawking’s voice didn’t make it into the voice of Siri
- the analog history of digital computing and the true differences between analog and digital
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