April 16, 2009 -- It still has much room for improvement
Okay, here's the long-promised first installment of trivia regarding von Kempelen's Speaking Machine.
The model you see here is actually von Kempelen's third attempt at building a speech synthesizer. As Joseph mentions, the first wasn't much more than a bagpipe reed and a kitchen bellows, and the second was more like an organ, with an individual pipe and key for each phoneme. The third design was an attempt to more closely emulate the human mouth, nose and throat, and was one of the first machines to successfully do so.
However rude it may appear on first glance, this final design is incredibly clever; you can see how it works in this interactive flash site from the Kempelen Farkas Speech Research Laboratory in Budapest, created to help demonstrate their working reconstruction of the machine for an International Phonetics workshop. Seriously, if you have the time, go poke around in there -- it's pretty awesome. If you don't have the time, this page has some photos of their reconstruction, as well as this sound file where a person first says a phrase, and the speaking machine repeats it. The Institute of Media Archeology in Austria also has their own replica, and their site offers sound and video clips (and is on public display for only a few more days, looks like! Dang, I wish I could afford plane fare to Austria right now). Here's one more replica for good measure.
Von Kempelen usually made it pronounce words and short phrases in Latin, Italian, or French rather than German, because the machine had difficulty with harsh consonants. Despite twenty years of work and continual adjustments to improve its inflection and pitch control, its voice remained very crude (and rather creepy). Still, it was an amazing effort for one man, and von Kempelen's contributions to the field are still noted today.
Speech simulation has taken quite a different turn these days -- scientists have largely given up on replicating human speech through physical means because it's just too difficult. Instead, research facilities have turned to creating huge libraries of individual sounds in sentence context.
The original speaking machine still exists, and can be viewed by the public in the Musical Instruments section of the The Deutsches Museum in Munich.
More trivia on the speaking machine (yes! more! not done yet! not even close!) next week.
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I honestly can't imagine how hard it would be to replicate a human voice analogically. Anyone who's ever messed around with a computer knows how hard it is to manipulate a digital voice!
I love the expressions of these two; it's pretty clear of the fast-formed relationship between a knowledge-starved student and a teacher whose lessons very few people likely understand!
I imagine the relationship went both ways; how many phonetics junkies were in Vienna at the time? Shop talk must've been hard to come by.
Actually, von Kempelen's house was said to be a popular hangout for scientists; I can only wonder about the powerful amounts of nerdery that workshop must've seen.