Why Does HAL Sing ‘Daisy, Daisy’ in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’?

Because Arthur C. Clark saw a synthesized speech demo at Bell Labs in 1962 where a computer sang that song. Kottke has a link to an audio clip. Update: Brad Smith emailed to point out that computer-music pioneer Max Mathews deserves some of the credit for that performance of “Daisy, Daisy”; it was Mathews’s arrangement, based on technology developed by Bell Labs’ John Kelly.

★ Tuesday, 25 April 2006