Digital recreation of the Voder 1939 machine into the new keyboard friendly Voder 2017.
Realtime keyboard speech synthesis system.
The Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator) was made by Homer Dudley at Bell Telephone Laboratory in 1937-1938. The Voder was a system capable of creating recognizable speech without human vocal cords entered into the procedure at any point.
Voder Diagram
The system consisted of a "buzzer" tube and a "hissing" tube which were two sound generators. And a series of keys which could switch between the two sounds and modulate those sounds into other sounds. As well as produce the "stop" consonants ('d', 'k', 'p'). There was also a pedal to change pitch during words, and a knob to make the voice sounds male or female by changing the pitch.
Control system of the Voder
Video demonstrating the Voder
Using the Voder required training as it required precise timing and accuracy to use effectively. The best operator was Helen Harper, who had a year of constant practice and trained approximately 20 other operators. The Voder had performances at the 1939 New York World's Fair and in San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition in late 1940. After the exhibitions the machine disappeared as it was a "proof-of-concept", and had no commercial value.
Using C++ and The Synthesis Toolkit (STK). STK is an open source audio signal processing and algorithmic synthesis classes. STK allows for extremely simple and portable realtime audio processing. More information can be found on the STK Website
The Voder has an important place in history as one of the first speech synthesis systems. A lot could be learned from recreating the system in the 21st century 80 years after it's inception. It can be used for text-to-speech without the need of any sound recordings.
Install required packages
sudo apt install automake autoconf libasound2 libasound2-dev libglfw3 libglfw3-dev libglew2.0 libglew1.13 libglew-dev
git clone
make
After compiling the code there will be various programs:
example - Simple test of sound generators and Formant filters.
keyboard_example - Prototype of Voder recreation: uses Q-P keys to control filters and Space to switch sound generators.
voder1 - More completed prototype. Some code redesigns and contains filters on most keys, (Q-P,A-;,Z-/). As well as controls for pitch and volume. GUI has not yet been finalized.
Move into STK folder
autoconf
./configure
make
If you have any questions contact us: [email protected]
Voder2017 is licensed under GPL v3.0 which can be viewed in LICENSE