The Daily Swarm

Welcome Sacha Frere-Jones’ Twitter followers…

While we appreciate the traffic Sacha’s sending our way, and generally do agree with his point that we over-quoted from his original piece in that case, this is, honestly, the very first complaint the Daily Swarm has ever received in this regard. Considering the frequency with which we link directly to Sacha’s posts, and the fact the he neglected to mention that we apologized to him for our over-zealousness back in February when it happened, and the hundreds of other ways his (and everyone’s) work is plagiarized on the net, holding us up as the prime example of poor linking is just absurd.

And even more absurd is the fact that in our attribution, AND HIS, it is clear these are words from Dave Tompkins… who just wrote a book for Stop Smiling called “How to Wreck a Nice Beach.” I personally was Dave’s first editor when he started crafting these theories, and that “someone else’s day of interviewing and editing has become ‘your’ labor is now free!” point is absurd because none of it was Sacha’s interviewing, editing, or “labor.” In fact, it was Dave Tompkins…

Todd

via Make

Homer Dudley also invented the VODER (Voice Operating DEmonstratoR), an electronic speaking instrument, which was unveiled (and demonstrated hourly) at the New York World’s Fair 1939–40. Inside the tall rack of sturdy electronic gear was a pitch controlled reedy oscillator, a white-noise source, and ten bandpass resonant filters. For a Voder to “speak” a talented, diligently trained operator “performed” at a special console connected to the rack, using touch-sensitive keys and a foot-pedal. These controlled the electronic generating components. The results, while far from perfect (it was damn difficult to operate!), were still entertaining and instructive of the principles involved.

Writer Dave Tompkins discusses the history of the Vocoder (via The New Yorker)

Invented in 1928 by a Bell Labs physicist named Homer Dudley, the Vocoder was a machine that “analyzed breakdowns of speech energy,” spread these frequencies across ten channels, and reassembled them into an electronic impression of the human voice. (Originally, Bell Labs wouldn’t release the name, so the New York Times called the Vocoder “a machine that tears speech to pieces.”) Dudley had been inspired by the work of Professor C. G. Kratzenstein, who won a Stalin Prize, in 1779, for constructing the first mechanical-speech device at the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg.

An offshoot of Dudley’s research was the Voder, a manually operated speech synthesizer that emulated the human vocal tract. The Voder was an experimental demo based on the Vocoder’s parameters of speech synthesis. The Voder’s speech was derived from two principal sounds: a vibrating buzz and a “shhh”—known as “unvoiced hiss energy.” (During early tests, engineers appeared to be shushing the machine.)