The Voder: 1939, the worlds first electronic voice synthesizer
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- Опубликовано: 20 ноя 2016
- The Voder was the worlds first voice electronic synthesizer. In 1939 Homer Dudley working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey began to publicly demonstrate the Voder, the first electronic device that could generate continuous human speech electronically.
The Voder was designed for the 1939 World Fair in New York as a showcase of the advanced work being done at Bell Laboratories. It was a manually operated system requiring training, ten finger, two foot paddles, a knee leaver and arm switch to generate sounds. The sounds quality actually was better than most voice synthesizers all the way up to the late 1990s.
This is audio from a radio program recorded live during the broadcast. 
Наука
“SHE saw me.”
“She saw meee!”
“She saaaw me!”
Simps: ⬆️
@@joannamysluk8623 your rude
@@leavemealone2154 Um no, I was making a joke.
Objekt!
Joke: funny. 🙄
"We don't anticipate any commercial use for the Voder." Little did they know...
Wait.. can I buy one?
@@ZuraTheCat i think they're referring to vocaloid/voiceroid and similar products ^^
@@ZuraTheCat well, there's a Voder voice in Chipspeech
@@manwhat4432 did they manage to replicate this one? I've searched for examples of its voice everywhere, but I can't find any. I'm considering buying it, but without an example of his voice I'm pretty unsure.
@@arianamarie8442 there's a demo you can try
10 years later it got it's wish to become a real boy, and founded Kraftwerk.
truly an operator of a pocket calculator
Truly a future man machine...
In their sparetime, they pretend to be robots driving on a German highway.
Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band, mit weißen Streifen, grüner Rand.
And it also play music nonstop...
Uno, due, tre-quatro (quattro😄).
This lady must know this machine to an extreme degree of detail. What a powerhouse.
Out of 300+ women training on this thing, she made the cut for the tech demo. That speaks for itself.
This was profoundly advanced for the 1940s.
1930s ;)
@@TheMrPeteChannel it was almost the 40`s
@@mattdonmovies then it would be the late 30's
Take into account this was recorded in 1939, and the woman said they took about a year to learn, assuming they didn't all try to learning at the same time (a class of 300+ is practically impossible, especially for non-commercial equipment where production is limited), all things considered, the earliest I'd deduce this to be in active development with prototype would be 1937. Wikipedia validates this saying it was invented 1937-1938, indicating uncertainty to the exact date of first prototype, likely due to related work the inventor was doing.
@@ImSumGuy they probably had one machine giving 1 hour lessons per day per girl over one year.
The grandpa of Vocaloid.
more like great-great grandfather of ALL vocal synths
Vocaloid isn't a true voice synthesiser, it's more a mixing method of splicing pre-recorded snippets. A true synthesiser generates the sound without samples.
@@feralferret Not really, it does synthesis to a degree. Like in longer notes and such. Of course some of the newer ones are a bit more complicated
The father of Vocoder.
As I said in a previous comment, the only thing missing is the automated control of a computer. I suppose that if you talk about doing Vocaloid where you add a vocal electronically to a song, it would only work with a live performance with Helen having to produce the speech on the fly. She could probably "play" the voder to sing Auld Lang Syne with a band. But it takes a computer to lay the vocal down as a recorded track and keep it in sync with everything else recorded in a song.
brilliant, 78 years ago, we had a voice synthesizer. that is beyond amazing.
Considering its functionality as such is completely reliant on the skill of an operator requiring "a year of constant practice" I would say it qualifies more as a musical instrument.
@@acf2802 I believe that Dale was talking about Mrs Harper here, not just the machine.
@@acf2802 all synthesizers are musical instruments
Some Dieselpunk stuff right here.
It might be possible to make it automatic, but each word would have to be programmed manually.
who thought about the HOURS the operator, this brilliant woman, spent on that bloody machine before extracting the sounds for this demonstration....
She was skilled beyond measure compared to just about everyone today. Its too bad Helen Harper is probably no longer in the land of the living, she was certainly an adult in 1939, that assumes she was born in perhaps 1920 at the latest, more likely 1915 or so since in photos she appears to be mid-20s, so that's over 100 years ago. But wow, realtime speech synthesis, her skills were at the level of replying via machine-voice at the same speed that it would take her to reply with her own vocal cords! She basically rewired her own brain by sheer will and hours of practice to be capable of two individual modes of speech!
@@Avetho Helen Harper was born in 1918 and passed away in 2010 : www.northcountrynow.com/obituaries/helen-harper-92-formerly-norwood
Seeing a woman working in a field like this was definitely rare in those days.
"Helen you are so silly. Let's her him recite:" INTERGALACTIC PLANETARY PLANETARY INTERGALACTIC
"Another dimension, another dimension"...
Zen Intergalactic "Planetary" Ninja. Silly stuff. Crash dummy test pilot.
DECEARING EGG
L I M P
Spell it
Discover
lol, nearly got heart attack
Still easier to understand than half the people I work with.
u wut mate?
As a software developer what I find so amazing is that they developed something that had no real use, but the work in developing this probably yielded some very important technologies or understandings.
It's s shame that nowadays so much of what we spend money on has to have a use or what we call in the software world a 'use case' .
Sometimes discovery and play are good enough reasons in themselves.
Spot on.
Like I said in another comment, the problem with the Voder was that it had to be operated by a person. Speech synthesis only became useful when it was built into computers. I actually find this video fascinating because I'm a computer programmer and do automated phone applications, one of which is a voice internet service that reads email and web pages with text-to-speech. I got interested in doing that because of discovering synthetic speech devices as a kid, such as arcade games like Berzerk and Gorf, a voice-enabled chess computer, and a Speak & Spell.
It might have changed some mutes life at the time though
There was a lot of discovery and play going on at Bell Labs back then.
Man, hats off to Ms. Harper... this is actually way more complex than playing piano, even!
@MorbidManMusic I have played a large variety of instruments before and I can tell you that piano is very simple. Sure you can play very impressive things with it but it is very limited to only a few factors. Things like the vodor have an immensely difficult learning curve because of all of the factors you must control. The entry level difficulty for the vodor is much more difficult than with piano
True! Like piano, organ and steno
machine at the same time.
Throw in a foot operated loom, too.
Wow.
I would compare it to playing pedal steel guitar.
More like a full organ with multiple manuals (keyboards), a pedal set, and stops (switches which change the timbre be engaging or disengaging sets of pipes).
what about homer dudley who invented it and also speech synthesis, didgtal compression and digital encryption/decryption, we wouldnt have modern computers or the internet or cell phones and satellite communication without his groundwork
Still better than the speech synthesis in Tomodachi Life
Floppy Disk Master gotta agree on that one
Yo coming for the ATTACK
they may be less expressive but they sound WAY more like what youd expect to come out of a real persons mouth
it actually sounds the same sorta
"Here. I want you to have this."
Voder: I am your father
Daft Punk: Noooooooo...
Daft Voder :-/
Daft Punk made the voice synths using talkbox
@@layoutgames-boris3481 when was the talk of invented
xD lol?!?!?
the best part is I came here after watching 2001, and I feel like I've come full circle
Layout Games no they didn’t. They used the vocoder.
Helen, could you have him say, "Domo arigato Mister Roboto"?
Please don't.
The effect in the Styx song is done with a Vocoder, which takes an audio signal with speech and makes it sound like a robot. The Voder actually produces speech.
@@jeopardy60611 Yes. If you look deeper into how a vocoder works, you'll find that the voder is half of a vocoder. We use a version of the vocoder daily every time we use the telephone, and that's why phone calls sound funny. Vocoders are my favorite musical effect, since I grew up in the 1970s.
@@buddyclem7328 I'm very disappointed that cell phones, cable phones, and other VOIP phones sound inferior to a traditional landline, but even though I got a landline when I moved into my new place 2 years ago, everyone I call has a phone that sounds horrible, so I can't understand people on the phone. It's almost as bad as 100 years ago when phones weren't amplified and you could hardly hear on them, as I tried out an early phone in a museum once.
@@jeopardy60611 I think that land lines have also degraded in quality. Since there are so many phone companies, and so many types of phone service now, it could be caused by encoding and decoding the audio stream multiple times and using different methods of encoding. Lag is the hardest part for me to get used to, followed by the uncertainty that I can be heard. It also bothers me that I cannot disable Caller ID on incoming calls.
That “mooo” was the creepiest thing of the whole video
That takes hella talent to control.
No, just practise.
@@l3p3 no. Practice creates talent. So both of you are right
@@l3p3 if you listened to the video, you'd have understood that less than 10% of anyone could operate it sufficiently after an entire year of practice. So yes, talent was required.
It seems there aren't enough buttons on it for this to be a legitimate product. Unless the buttons are individual phonemes? Well there are like 30 phonemes in standard English so I'm curious
@@niccster1061 so does that explain the 6 year old piano prodigies?
Do you not believe it born talent?
The person working the Voder is the real champ. That keyboard + FX chain must have taken forever to master.
yea i guess homer dudley who invented it was a chump he only invented speech synthesis, digital compression and digital encryption/decryption, we wouldnt have modern computers or the internet or cell phones and satellite communication without his groundwork
A musical ear, great hand eye coordination, and obsession was required to operate one of these. I wonder if anyone is left that can still puppet one of these.
Hold my beer, while I crack my phalanges...
👋🎹👋 🎼🎶🔊
Miss Harper is a bad ass.
Oh yeah she was. An absolute total badass.
Btw, I was gonna make a joke about how she's actually quite the charming looking lady in response to the presence of a space in the word "badass" in your comment, but eh, I'm just in a spazzy mood today XD
At 1:18, when the Voder said "greetings, everybody," I think of KAITO's voice and how they sound somewhat similar.
P.S. 1:28 makes me think of Gackupo.
So I wasn’t the only one that thought this machine sounded like the Vocaloid guys xD
Thing probably had a bazillion vacuum tubes and could heat the room in winter by itself.
In a number of seconds no less
It actually is more like an electronic organ. Not a computer. It would just be as warm as an organ
I honestly think it's kind of cute
:3
ikr, its strange how these people are able to give a robot a personality
I feeel fantaaaaastiiic
RustyRainbow22
I Love this vídeo XD
also
Please leave
hey hey hey
@@Shiznit304 It's faaaaaat Albert!
oh my god this is adorable, i love how they refer to the voder as he-
i would die for him
As someone who relies on speech synthersis every day, and who oft takes it for granted, this is kind of humbling. Created simply to prove a principle... or just to wow folk with what Bell labs could do, its inventors had no way of knowing they had created the dinosaur ancestor of Hal and Jaws and Window Eyes. Totally amazing stuff! Someone needs to create a screen reader voice that sounds like the voder!
Microsoft Sam's great grandfather
@cgwworldministries sad but true. like if development stalled there... and went back a bit.
*_"I COULD ALWAYS DO LOTS OF AMAZING THINGS!"_*
soi soi soi soi soi soi soi soi
You have selected Microsoft's Sam as the computer default voice.
@@couchcamperTM The difference is that one is automatic and the other has to be manually adjusted
interesting how in the past ten year vocal synthesizers have completely boomed and sky rocketed in popularity. it has developed faster than ever and it’s sounding more human than these people would’ve imagined. Cool to see where it all started in 1939
To put this in perspective, the first automobile was only around 50 years old at this time.
more impressed with the skill of the operator then the machine - and that's are rare thing
yeah I suppose, it took me years before I built my first vocoder @Gackt Sama
@Gackt Sama homer dudley invented it and also speech synthesis, didgtal compression and digital encryption/decryption, we wouldnt have modern computers or the internet or cell phones and satellite communication without his groundwork
2:12
And there you have it folks, one of the most popular audio effects in YTPs done in 1939!
ha yeah
Incredible.
Vibrato existed long before even this machine
It's great to listen 1939's voices without that weird accent, isn't?
Junior ...they say you learn something new everyday ... I saw a video of a lady that is an expert in American English accents & that weird accent you speak of is called “transatlantic” is not real !!!! It was created by Hollywood with the sole purpose of being more exciting
Isn’t that crazy .....
ruclips.net/video/e0qzIZaiPFs/видео.html
PawnShopMike - So it was to make it more interesting as opposed to modern news stations that are trying to sound as generic and region free as possible
It was an attempt to sound affluent more than anything - speaking with a transatlantic accent was supposed to make you sound like you came from “better” blood
A huge number of American movie stars were english. 3 of the top stars in Gone With the Wind were English.
"So, what instrument do you play?"
"Well, about that..."
guy: who saw you?
machine: "sheee saaaw meeee"
*VOCALOID 0.0 VERSION*
*MIKU'S FATHER WAS BORN IN 1939 AND HE IS ALMOST 90 YEARS OLD!*
nope... great great grandfather
This year the voder will be 80 years old,let’s celibrate it.
_That's not how math works_
Yelling in bold caps, need attention?
Anime is garbage for garbage people.
Two bombs weren't enough.
This lady is an absolute BEAST
Ya know, those unvoiced consonants sound really damned good.
Nestled right in the middle of uncanny valley 👌🏼
78 years ahead of it's time
In a very real sense, that was the core of the early computer speech cards. Instead of fingers controlling switches, it was done with computer bits.
from a synth freak's point of view - bloody amazing!
This was done with live keyboard and foot pedal input by the operator to produce ANY words or sentences instantly. Without a voice tube or mic input, I don’t think anyone could do this LIVE today with any modern synth.
You're thinking of a "vocoder," "talkbox," or "squeezebox." Some of the electronics may be similar, but the vocoder actually provides the electronics to make the vocal sound, rather than someone's voice going through it.
Amazing. And part of the 1939 world's fair.
Of things to come
Daisy, Daisy give me your answer do. I'm half crazy....
Open the pod bay doors, Hal!
All for the love of youuu
better than text to speech
Helen the original synthlord queen. All hail helen synthlord queen!
This is such an under appreciated tool... Imagine what a professional musician would do with it today?
Maybe mumble rap?
@@pygmalion8952 Right, but ok while totally not practical, if there was more options (as many as this has) on the digital versions then I feel my own work on Punk Computer would of been better and more expressive. Note though I wrote that set many years ago. Moved away from the idea because of limits...
Check out modern voice synths like Vocaloid, Utau, and SynthV. They havw been used to make music for the past two decades
this is insanely cool i love old tech and the history of stuff like this
Damn I was expecting the end to include “and now for our western listeners, say good afternoon radio audience”
I think we've found the inspiration for the speech in Tomodachi Life, everybody!
The Shadowman they say you learn something new everyday ... I saw a video of a lady that is an expert in American English accents & that weird accent you speak of is called “transatlantic” is not real !!!! It was created by Hollywood with the sole purpose of being more exciting
Isn’t that crazy .....
That's incredible, truly impressive for 1939! It's crazy how you basically play it like an instrument, it's really facing.
"Shall we play a game? How about global thermonuclear warfare?"
I just thought of something. At the end of the video, they say that the Voder has no commercial applications. Since the Voder can only perform live and can't be automated in any way, the one thing it can do is be used in a science fiction movie that depicts a talking computer or robot. Since the speech just needs to be recorded for the movie, it can be produced in real time, and it doesn't matter that there is not yet a computerized process to do it automatically.
Darth Voder!
"requiring ten fingers, two foot paddles, a knee lever....." sounds like the manual operation of a pedal steel guitar!
Why isn't this in a horror movie or something its amazing
“Helen, what else can he say?”
“I want your clothes, your boots and your motor-cycle…”
Recommended by 8 bit guy
How to get inspiration of Vocaloid
I was trying to remember how I got this on my "watch next", thank you
@@sligovolts np
What video please
5'00" As a french man i has to say, i always loved listening to a robot speaking french with an american accent lol ^^
Hey Miku, Is this your grandpa? He seems nice..
Jude Norell you mean great great grandfather
Now that I think of it, he sounds like Kaito English when he's used for Talkloids.
Family Tree by generation:
Voder -> Vocoder-> IBM 7094 -> Vocaloid
This is a light hearted joke btw :)
This is like the sort of invention my younger self would (and did and still sometimes does) come up with: A prostetic voice. While competely ignoring practical considerations like size, portability, and the staggering musical *talent* needed for use
Maybe not a mad scientist, but more of a rouge engineer. Another time another life, yeah?
There go my favorite vocaloid
Sounds far better than most current speech synthesizers.
I was always fascinated with computerized speech. I discovered a Fidelity voice chess computer, Speak & Spell, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Voice Synthesizer, and video games such as Gorf and Wizard of War, and that paved the way for what I'm doing now, a system that reads email and web pages over the phone. I had no idea that there was a speech synthesizer so long ago that had to be operated manually.
I have a feeling that this kind of speech synthesis technology might pop back up in the future.
I love this so much! If only someone could make an online version of it. I would love to try it!
Kraftwerk!
Great for 1939
What was the purpose of this device though?
I’m guessing at the time it was probably just R&D for research’s own sake, plus demonstrating the engineering capabilities of the company to future contractors and investors.
(I love your video game history videos btw!! :D)
So miku could walk sir
Actually...when you make a phone call today - your voice is deconstructed and then reconstructed using much of this technology in order to save bandwidth. Same with the voice you hear.
The cell phone line is not transmitting a "recording" as such of your, or anybody elses, voice.
Yup like ^ said, bell was messing with trying to break down analogue sound into "signals" that controlled which frequencies to "turn the volume down" to get back the same
This essentially became long-distant voice communication (as opposed to just morse-code telegraph) between allied governments in the world wars, and then eventually land-line (ie it wasn't just raw analogue signal of your voice in electric form being transmitted over cable, which back then grandma's would eavesdrop on their neighbours since a neighbourhood shared a line, but now it was rapid analogue signals of how much each frequency had to be filtered to recreate the voice.)
This is why voice over telephone up till the mid 2010s had a distinct telephone-effect filter, since it was not 1-to-1 voice transmission like from a microphone to amp speakers, but more like a few dozen frequencies blasted together at equal strength and then limited by relevant filters. Think of like a sensitive high-speed music equaliser.
The transmitting end was just having a dozen filters tuned only to pass specific frequency ranges, and the receiving end was taking a full-band sound and filtering it accordingly for each frequency band and then adding all up.
The vocoder was just a trial to demonstrate the capabilities, by having a person manually activate switches instead of having a transmitter automatically making the relevant signals.
Pretty cool tho. It's like instead of hooking the TV to the cable outlet, you had a system that allowed someone to manually recreate the signals that will draw on the screen
@@jarls5890 Kinda brings up the question of just what is a "recording" anyway?
The phone system codec you're describing is basically just lossy audio compression very tuned for voice. The most common one is known as AMR, and uses Linear Predictive Coding to very efficiently compress voice (down to 7-12 kilobits/sec total for the whole data stream). However it's a hybrid codec--because just using the LPC data on its own would produce a kind of unnatural-sounding voice, it also transmits a specially compressed stream of the error between the real signal and the LPC-modeled signal. Theoretically there's no limit to the fidelity if that residual stream is allowed to increase in bitrate so it would approach an exact recording of your voice (but in practice it is very low bitrate).
Looks to be at the RCA exhibit at 1939 NYWF. The first TV was across the floor being displayed for the first time, ever. I would head to the Westinghouse Exhibit and check out Elecktro the first robot and check out the worlds first official "Time Capsule" after the RCA Exhibit. 1939 NYWF will be a huge destination for time travelers one day. Too many world changing inventions debuted that year there for it not to be.
bell labs not RCA
This is actually better than 95% of synthetic voices.
Nope, you should check out vocaloid. You can get almost human vocals.
@@gizmo4192 Nope, SynthV has better vocals.
@@OttoOG3 True but I never said vocaloid was the best, I just offered a widely known example of modern voice synthesis
Truly amazing given the time and resources! Such innovation that ended up being "commercial"!
this is a lot better than what i thought it would be
Only 'a year of constant practice' to get it to do what you want. Sheesh. 😬
So its easier to play than most other instruments then.
Dave, stop.
Stop, will you?
Stop, Dave.
Will you stop, Dave?
Stop, Dave.
I'm afraid.
I'm afraid, Dave.
Dave, my mind is going.
I can feel it.
Daisy daisy.. give me your answer do...
i'm a...fraid....
2001
Great post ! Tube synth circuits with such ability, I had no Idea. The evolution of technology is almost as interesting as the technology itself. Electronics is thE single most useful & amazing thing we've discovered/invented imo.
early vocaloid
It'd be great to have a working version.
i remember hearing about a voice synth before 1939, that looked like a traveling pipe organ and supposedly it had some sort of artificial head
It has even a flanger and a vibrato ?, that shit was way waaaay beyond it's time
still amazing to me in 2019
"sO eAsY eVen A wOmAN cAN dO It" 28 out of 320 women, and a year of practice. 93.75% of those who got in, never finished. Can you even imagine how difficult that is? Women truly are the unsung heroes of computers.
women were at home in those days. they had plenty of free time
The earliest form of utau or ancient vocaloid
That honour would go to Euphonia, the mechanical voice synthesizer created by Joseph Faber... in 1845
That is extremely impressive!
The most important speech synth ever made.
Amazing. But all that choreography between
keys and pedals makes it easy
to understand why it didn't
catch on.
That's not criticism, btw.
Is there a working example
anywhere, the Smithsonian or
the like? Or a recent video?
Right in the video it stated it was created for an exhibit at the worlds fair, for educational purposes and was never meant to be marketed at all.
@White Rice Then why did you answer?! 😐 😅😅
@@K.D.Meyers Subhumans who use emojis in lieu of language should be shot behind a shed.
Bell Laboratories: We have a voice synthesizer that speaks.
Kraftwerk: Hold my robot.......
Thank you Homer Dudley. I recently read How to wreck a nice beach and can't believe I am watching a video of the first vocoder.
HES SO CUTE I LOVE HIM
I wonder if this machine still exists, or if it became parts. It'd be really cool to see one work... or maybe see the schematics and build a clone.
there is a youtube recommendation on the right side of the screen listing a channel that would be nine months before you commented about a replica
It´s really amazing!
So wonderful. Peace Christo
That’s actually so cool!! It sounds better than most voice synthesizers these days tbh-
this sounds so wierd. its crazy how much we have advanced
I need this in my life !!
The predecessor of the Vocaloid
This is incredible.1939!i thought it was during the Moog incarnation, and I like to think I know of most(not all) of electronic history.thankyou.
I just thought of something. Although there was no computer technology around to automate the speech, there were pianos and organs that used paper rolls punched with holes to play them automatically. Perhaps the Voder could have been automated by recording the control movements on paper in a similar fashion, so a speech could have been recorded and played back that way.
bro tomodachi life has around the same quality voices wtf
DAMN, the low voice is still pretty much the same robot voice used today. And it sounds like the Speak & Spell.