Phonetics and speaking machines: On the mechanical simulation of human speech in the 17th century
Summary
This paper shows that in the 17th century various attempts were made to build fully automatic speaking devices resembling those exhibited in the late 18th-century in France and Germany. Through the analysis of writings by well-known 17th-century scientists, and a document hitherto unknown in the history of phonetics and speech synthesis, an excerpt from La Science universelle (1667[1641]) of the French writer Charles Sorel (1599–1674), it is argued that engineers and scientists of the Baroque period have to be credited with the first model of multilingual text-to-speech synthesis engines using unlimited vocabulary.
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References
Bedini, Silvio A.
Caus, Salomon de
Chapman, Roger E.
Chapuis, Alfred & Edouard Gélis
Chomsky, Noam
Cordemoy, Gérault de
Descartes, René
Euler, Leonard
Friedell, Egon
Gaffarel, Jacques
Godwin, Joscelyn
Hardcastle, William J. & Nigel Hewlett
Helmholtz, Hermann
Kemp, J. Alan
Kibbee, Douglas A.
Kohler, Klaus
Kühnert, Barbara & Francis Nolan
Matthiae, Jacobus (Jacob Madsen)
Mersenne, Marin
Panconcelli-Calcia, Giulio
Séris, Jean-Pierre
Sorel, Charles
Stauff, Edward L.
Wallis, John