Kraftwerk + something on-topic

[cyborg0 at GlobalEyes.net]

Brett Duggan wrote:

> by a very primitive form of speech synthesis (not a vocoded human
> voice).  I thought that speech synthesis did not come about until
> sometime in the late 70's (i.e. sometime after 1975).  Does anyone have
> any idea what they used to pull this off back in 1975?

Well, from what I understand from reading many ancient texts on analog
computers, there WAS a unit, as early as the early 60s, that the
military codebreakers were working on, in conjunction with Noam Chomsky
and a few other codebreaker/linguist/computer types that was supposed to
be a language translator in real time.. They came amazingly close to
having it work, but the fact that they came so close prolly spelled its
demise. The govt was often more afraid of things that worked than things
that did not! I believe the research was done at bell labs. It also cost
a fortune. I have other sources that also trace the invention of modular
synthesizers to experiments in speech and phonetics..
rob