Analog Speech Synthesis

[R.G. Keen]

>I came across something curious recently, an analog speech synthesis
>experiment kit. It was produced in about 1964 by Bell Labs as a part of
>their education program for computer and electronics students.
Yeah, I ran into the book for that. Neat, succinct description of voice
synthesis.

>It includes a rather in depth book which discusses the fundamental theories
>of speech synthesis, all in purley analog terms. When this kit was sold,
>the Votrax SC-01 was still over a decade away. The kit allows you to
>construct an analog vowel synthesizer, comprised of a rectangle wave
>generator, three L-C formant stages (ferrie bobbin type) and an audio
>stage. By tweaking the cap values in the formant stages, the unit can
>(rougly) produce all english vowel sounds, and lots of other strange noises
>in between.

>Has anyone encountered anything else related to analog speech production?
>Frankly, I've never seen anything else like it.
I still have a couple of SC-01's somewhere. Of course, the
text-to-speech that comes with some soundblasters makes the hardware
kind of unneeded now. The other speech-related item that comes to mind
is the Electro-Harmonix "Talking Pedal", which was a guitar stompbox; a
variant of the wah pedal, it used two bandpass filters and a dual
center control on a rocker pedal that were optimized for faking the
first two formants of speech - at least as well as they can be faked
with so simple a setup.