This wonderful relic from the dawn of speech synthesis is a 2-minute recording from Bell Laboratories, first published in 1962, showcasing the work of John L. Kelly and Louis J. Gerstman for the Visual and Acoustics Research Department. I acquired this 45 RPM soundsheet in 1966, in the 9th grade, when I began working on a speech synthesis system of my own. (I finally made it to the International Science Fair in 1969 with my “acoustic analog of the vocal tract,” which even had a voice-change problem.) I slurped this from a USB turntable in 2008, conjured an MP3, sold the soundsheet on eBay, then in 2023 edited the file in Audacity to reduce the background noise.
Bell Labs speech synthesis – audio
