Wolfgang von Kempelen's Speaking Machine

Wolfgang von Kempelen's Speaking Machine is a manually operated speech synthesizer that began development in 1769, by Austro-Hungarian author and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen. It was in this same year that he completed his far more infamous contribution to history: The Turk, a chess-playing automaton, later revealed to be a very far-reaching and elaborate hoax due to the chess-playing human-being occupying its innards.^[4] But while the Turk’s construction was completed in six months, Kempelen’s Speaking Machine occupied the next twenty years of his life.^[2] After two conceptual “dead ends” over the first five years of research, Kempelen’s third direction ultimately led him to the design he felt comfortable deeming “final”: a functional representational model of the human vocal tract.^[3]

Kempelen’s first experiment with speech synthesis involved only the most rudimentary elements of the vocal tract necessary to produce speech-like sounds. A kitchen bellows, used to stoke fires in wood-burning stoves, was invoked as a set of lungs to supply the airflow. A reed extracted from a common bagpipe was implemented as the glottis, the source of the raw fundamental sound in the vocal tract. The bell of a clarinet made for a sufficient mouth, despite its rigid form. This basic model was able to produce simple vowel sounds only, though some additional articulation was possible by positioning one’s hand at the bell opening to obstruct airflow. The physical hardware for constructing the nasals, plosives and fricatives that most consonants require was not present, however. Kempelen, like many other early pioneers of phonetics, misunderstood the source of the perceived “higher frequencies” of certain sounds as a function of the glottis, rather than as the function of the formants of the entire vocal tract, so he abandoned his single-reed design for a multiple-reed approach.^[2][3]

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