Saturday, January 3, 2015

Early Speech Synthesizer (1939)

Considered the first electrical speech synthesizer, VODER (Voice Operation DEmonstratoR) was developed by Homer Dudley at Bell Labs and demonstrated at both the 1939 New York World's Fair and the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Difficult to use and difficult to operate, VODER nonetheless paved the way for future machine-generated speech.

Robot voice from 1940

A long time before Daft Punk and Kraftwerk: The sonovox from the movie "You'll Find Out", in year 1940.


Amazing device that gives voice to musical instruments. The Sonovox consists of one or two louspeakers placed on the throat that play the source sound. The performer whispers the words while the speakers stand in for the voice box. Used for the talking train in Disney's Dumbo, uncountable radio promos, a tube-in-the-mouth version "Talk Box" was used by Frampton to make his guitar sing, and all-electronic "Vocoder" versions are still used in current pop music.