The First Computer to Sing

Wrote Sue Schoenfeld:

I began working for Wisconsin Telephone Co. in 1970.

One of my first managers had worked on the computerized voice synthesis program at Bell Labs in the 1960s.

I was studying to be a speech therapist at the time so he figured I'd be interested: He told me that one of his projects was to figure out what place in the United States had the "least accent" (more correctly, "least dialect").

He conferred with experts and determined that Kansas was the place.

He hired a female speech therapist in Kansas to record the phonetic sounds of the English language.

These recordings were then fed into the program on the IBM computer and became the famous "Daisy" song.

He said that one of the most difficult parts of the project was to deal with the fact that the computer lisped.

The "s" sound was the most difficult to program.

He gave me a recording of one of the earlier versions of the song as a souvenir, and sure enough, it was "Daithy, Daithy...."