Voder

The Voder was a manually driven speech synthesizer developed by Homer Dudley at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Details are described in US Patent 2,121,142 (filed 1937). The Voder was demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair.

The voder was manually operated by trained technicians, as shown in Fig.H.5. Pitch was controlled by a foot pedal, and ten fingers controlled the bandpass gains. Buzz/hiss selection was by means of a wrist bar. Three additional keys controlled transient excitation of selected filters to achieve stop-consonant sounds [73]. ``Performing speech'' on the Voder required on the order of a year's training before intelligible speech could reliably be produced. The Voder was a versatile performing instrument having intriguing possibilities well beyond voice synthesis.

See also the Smithsonian Speech Synthesis History Project:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/speechsynthesis/ss_btl1.htm

Listen to Voder

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About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.