【1961 | IBM 7094 : First Computer To Sing】 Daisy Bell

BACKGROUND: «Daisy Bell» was composed by Harry Dacre in 1892. In 1961, the IBM 7094 became the first computer to sing, singing the song Daisy Bell. Vocals were programmed by John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum and the accompaniment was programmed by Max Mathews. This performance was the inspiration for the famous scene in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the HAL 9000 computer sings the song as it is deactivated. FURTHER READING: YAMAHA's «Daisy Project»: While it did not become a product, the «Elvis Project» helped establish that a series of phonetics in a wide range of pitches would help build a synthesizer based on any model. YAMAHA agreed to help them start a fresh new project; it was at this point that Kenmochi Hideki joined. The first initial ideas came from him in Japan in 2000, with most of the research done at the Pompeu Fabra University and the development of the core signal processing libraries created in C++. YAMAHA itself was responsible for the product design and development of the actual product. It was pure collaborative research, and they did not think about selling at that time. At the time, synthesizers would take days to produce good quality results, but the vocal would always sound inhuman and obviously generated by a machine or computer. The price was expensive as well. This meant that while all other parts of the music production were by then fully able to be recreated in a DAW, producing a good quality vocal performance meant hiring a human...