The eternal voice of Stephen Hawking – Big Think

While Stephen Hawking’s ashes were being buried during a memorial service at Westminster Cathedral in 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) beamed into space an original score by Greek composer Vangelis that included Hawking’s voice. The Cebreros station outside Madrid broadcast the transmission towards the nearest black hole to Earth.

In a press release“It is both wonderful and moving to imagine that Stephen Hawking’s voice with Vangelis’ music will reach the black hole in about 3,500 years, where it will be frozen by the event horizon,” ESA Director of Science Guenther Hassinger was quoted as saying. The move was intended to honor Hawking’s seminal contribution to astrophysics, his theory that thermal radiation is spontaneously emitted from black holes due to the continuous conversion of quantum vacuum fluctuations into pairs of particles, one of which escapes infinitely while the other is trapped inside the black hole. Hawking radiation, and the related question of whether information falling into a black hole is lost or can somehow be recovered from the radiation, was a profound concept that still sparked controversy among theoretical physicists. Interestingly, Hassinger’s comments take for granted that the information-made sound, produced by the audio synthesizer that Hawking used to communicate for more than 30 years, was simply “Stephen Hawking’s voice.”

At the time of his death, there were more notices in the press about Hawking’s voice than about Hawking’s radiation, suggesting that he was publicly popular as a personality that combined the two. Reuters reported Hawking’s synthesized voice “was his instrument and his trademark,” describing it as “automated chatter that somehow enhanced the profound impact of the cosmic secrets he revealed.” until Obituary for Hawking in nature His long-time colleague Martin Rees noted “the robotic accent that became his trademark” and also speculated that Hawking’s field of cosmology was part of what made his life story resonate with audiences around the world — and that “the concept of an imprisoned mind wandering the cosmos captured people’s imaginations.” Certainly the publishers of Hawking’s famous novel about the universe, A Brief History of Time.,“They must have thought so, as they chose to display a photo of a stoic-looking Hawking sitting in his wheelchair against a starry night sky on the front cover of the first American edition of the book. Even if only metaphorically, Hawking was one of the world’s most famous living cyborgs, moving and speaking by electromechanical means because his flesh-and-blood body could not, and traveling through the universe in his mind.”

Hawking, who suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), lost his ability to speak after a trip to Switzerland in 1985 when pneumonia forced doctors to put him on a ventilator. After being returned to the UK, he had a tracheotomy performed to help him breathe. After recovering from a near-fatal pneumonia, Hawking initially used a spell card to communicate, indicating letters by raising his eyebrows, a temporary solution with obvious limitations.

Hawking’s first synthesizer used an iteration of “Perfect Paul”, a synthesized sound created by MIT research scientist Dennis Klatt, and played on an Apple II computer with modifications that made the system more portable. It allowed Hawking to communicate at a rate of 15 spoken words per minute Using hand clicker to select words From a separate program that displays it on the screen. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a degenerative neurological disease that affects muscle control, so it could be argued that Hawking’s need for a device that would allow him to write was far more important than the sound synthesis component, but sound synthesis allowed Hawking an additional way to communicate.

To be sure, Hawking’s generic “voice” is created differently than the sound from the human body’s vocal system, but even that sound generated from electricity, signal processing algorithms, circuits, software code, and the distant echo of Dennis Klatt’s body—Perfect Bull was manufactured from Klatt’s recordings of himself—becomes unique in his specific incarnation of Stephen Hawking, even in how he sounds. The synthesized sound became “its own” through his body’s intimate interactions with and through it. Although voice itself, as an electronic technology, lacked most of the expressive capabilities of the body, Hawking was known to use its capabilities and limitations as expressions of his personality.

He delivered his lectures by sending memorized text to a speech synthesizer one sentence at a time, but he stated that he had “tried out the lecture, and polished it, before I gave it”, a statement which implied that he was rehearsing a performance that included revisions to the way the lecture was delivered. It seemed It has as much as its content. Known for his joviality, Hawking has appeared as himself on or recorded dialogue on numerous television shows, including “The Big Bang Theory” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” He recorded dialogue for his portrayal in the animated series “The Simpsons” For three separate episodes He was also made into a Simpsons action figure. he He told reporters in 2014“My ideal role would be a villain in a James Bond movie. I think a wheelchair and a computer voice would be perfect for this role.”

Hawking’s synthesized voice was his “trademark”, as his obituary described it, although it was not literally Hawking’s trademark (it was not his intellectual property). On a web page that Hawking maintained during his lifetime, he credited David Mason of Cambridge Adaptive Communications with putting together the original Speech Plus system for him. “This company manufactures and supplies a variety of products to help people with communication problems express themselves,” Hawking wrote. Early in 1988, Speech Plus offered Hawking a new synthesizer, the CallText 5010, with improved text-to-speech capabilities, but Hawking insisted that the company provide him with a device that used the same voice as his previous unit. Hawking stated of his version of Perfect Paul, “I use a separate synthesizer, made by Speech Plus. It’s the best I’ve ever heard, although it gives me an accent that has been variously described as Scandinavian, American, or Scottish.” It was He is known to joke with the American public It gave him an American accent.

Hawking famously rejected “upgrades” of his communications equipment, having accepted the specific configuration of the hardware and software, and the sound they produced, as his own. As the technology he was using to speak became outdated, it became easier for Hawking to control others’ use of the synthesized voice with which he had become so closely associated. Hawking The cut was approved From the biopic The Theory of Everything in 2014 before he allowed producers to use his synthesizer to re-record the dialogue. This particular synthesized sound identified with Hawking in both directions. Not only would many people today hear him and call him “the voice of Stephen Hawking” even after his death, but Hawking himself also insisted on keeping the first synthesized voice he ever used for the remaining 32 years of his life, even as sound synthesis techniques improved.

Eventually, Hawking’s 1980s-era synthesizer hardware broke down, and other factors, from the continuing degeneration of Hawking’s nerves to the incompatibility of his specialized software and input hardware with the latest computer systems, made it necessary to update it. Many people—graduate students, programmers, and a research team from Intel—were involved in making the new system work to Hawking’s satisfaction.

The only thing Hawking insisted on was keeping the Perfect Paul version that emerged from the specific devices he started using in 1986. Programmer Peter Binney worked on a software simulator From the original microprocessor and digital signal processor of the CallText 5010, without the benefit of the original hardware schematics or software source code. The only thing he had was machine code. The team struggled to find a copy of the original audio, especially since the company formerly known as Speech Plus has been sold or acquired four times since then. A spare tape from 1986 was finally found by contacting Eric Dorsey, an engineer who worked on the CallText 5010 and took questions from the press about the synthesizer when Hawking visited California on a three-week lecture tour in 1988. When the team tracked down Dorsey in 2014, he was working for TiVo and was shocked to learn that Hawking was still using the new CallText 5010. The simulator was finally submitted for Hawking’s approval in January 2018, just two months before his death. He never used the new system in public due to his poor health.

Since first adopting the CallText5010 with his version of the Perfect Paul in the mid-1980s, Hawking has had numerous opportunities to upgrade the components of his communications system, but declined because the sound generated by the original setup had become his own. Only Klatt’s friends and colleagues heard the echo of someone else’s speech in Hawking’s speech. And they heard it everywhere in the late 1980s. Perfect Paul versions have been a common default for text-to-speech systems, including many “voice-text” telephone information systems, for a few decades. Although Klatt’s system included other sounds such as “Sweet Betty” and “Kit the Kid” (based on samples recorded by Klatt’s wife and daughter, respectively), Perfect Ball was seen as the easiest to understand, although it had its limitations. the New York Times Klat described the vehicle’s sounds as “usually intelligible but sounds as if it had a foreign accent,” which is higher praise than any other system, which the newspaper somewhat offensively described as sounding “like a distorted recording of someone with a lisp.”

As the hardware and sound synthesis software improved over time, the resonance of Dennis Klatt became fainter and the association between Hawking and his specific incarnation of Perfect Paul became more solid. “I keep it because I have never heard a sound I like better and because I have recognized it,” Hawking said He explained in 2006. The desire to have a sound of its own outweighs any benefit of updating its systems. In 2013, journalist Lucy Hawking, Stephen’s daughter, I interviewed Kalat’s daughterDr Laura Fine on BBC Radio. Lucy was fifteen years old when her father lost the ability to speak. Laura was 18 years old when her father died of cancer. “(It) means my father actually speaks in your father’s voice,” Lucy said 25 years later. “(My father) would be so happy… I never really thought about how to live my father’s voice,” Laura answered.

Hawking’s association with Perfect Paul shows how intimate our subjective experience of our voices is, as well as the connection it provides us with the social world, which may reflect our society’s biases. Hawking’s use of Perfect Paul conveyed his sense of humor, his intelligence, as well as his physical disabilities. Although it was the standard sound on equipment used by many people, it sounded so unique as Hawking used it as an individual, that he did not want to upgrade his equipment because that would mean changing the sound of for him voice. In this example of cyborg collaboration, the machine has become an extension of Hawking’s body, but is just as susceptible to aging and breakdown as our biological bodies. Far from transhumanist dreams, Hawking’s example shows that the experience of being human is a fully embodied one.

Sarah A. Bill A writer and professor who studies the effects of information technology on society. She is the author ofVox ex Machina: A Cultural History of Talking Machines“, from which this article is adapted. An open access version of the book is available for download here.

this condition Originally published on MIT Press Reader.