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Figure 7. reehrners "artiea1ateryseere,'* inspireaz by early speaking machines. The eaptian reads '14 physialagiml transeriptian afsirnaztaneaas
artieaiatians by anaiagy with rnasieai nates. The harizrrntai Iinzs afnates express the pzaee afartieaiatian, whereas the vzrtiml zines express
the simultuneity afartiealatiens, with udditianul signs denating individual praperties 0f the artiealatians and their variants.‘ Definitians af
rigferent signs are shawn an the main ehart. Twa examples tmnscribing the chinese warrifar ‘ear' (with a tune) anal the Khaisan ward far
“ta lave" (with a eziek) are given ta the left afthe sehernatie Vaml traet, while a full mticulutary searefar the German phrase "15! es wirklich
wahr?' is given an the right. Reprmiucedfmm Techmer (1880).
vocal tract articulations, simultaneously and sequentially, to intimately familiar, into a practical method for phonetic
produce each single coherent unit of speech. This was also transcription. Techmer (1880) proposed a symbolic alpha-
the first system for unrestricted real-time speech synthe- bet of vocal tract constriction types as the fundamental
sis, allowing the performer to play any desired sequence of units of speech. Revisiting the analogy between music and
speech sounds based on concatenation of discrete phonetic speech, he proposed that utterances could be represented
units defined by the keys. It was the first system to systemat- in terms of such constrictions, organized according to an
ically incorporate the synthesis of intonation and performed “articulatory score” by analogy with a traditional score in
the first song ever sung by a machine. All of these achieve- music. Different lines of the score represent independently
ments are quite remarkable for their time and represent the controllable articulators; single notes represent the acti-
zenith of what was accomplished with mechanical synthesis vation of specific articulators at particular points in time,
until very recently. whereas chords represent the simultaneous coordination
of multiple articulator combinations to achieve particular
Techmer's “Articulatory Scores" constrictions. Critically, for the first time, the temporal as
Faber’s “Euphonia” was exhibited across the whole of well as the spatial coordination of articulatory movements
Europe, Russia, and America for more than 40 years, with is explicitly represented, and timing becomes an intrinsic
hundreds of newspaper accounts of public demonstrations part of the representation of speech. The example he gave to
that often also refer back to Mical, Kempelen, and Kratzen- illustrate his system, an analysis of the German phrase, “Is!
stein. Although these speaking machines are now almost es wirklich wnhr?” is partly reproduced in Figure 7.
forgotten, they were well-known to the major scientists of
the day, not only as public spectacles for entertainment but Techmer’s system can be viewed as the natural extension
also as genuine objects of scientific inquiry into the nature to speech of Engramelle’s earlier proposal for transcribing
of human speech (Lindsay, 1997b). individual musical performances. It could potentially have
been employed to combine Mical’s programmable cylinder
One of those scientists, Friedrich Techmer, developed an mechanism with Faber’s vocal tract keyboard to yield a fully
entire theory of articulatory phonetics based on his fascina- automated, programmable, mechanical speech synthesizer,
tion with talking automata. I.n his “Habilitationschrift” from realistically simulating the articulations and acoustics of a
the University of Leipzig, published in 1880, he reviewed physical vocal tract to reproduce natural speech.
the last century of progress in speech physiology and pho-
netics and attempted to synthesize many of the principles Unfortunately, popular and scientific interest in mechani-
embodied in the speaking machines, with which he was cal speech synthesis largely vanished with the appearance of
Summer 2019 | AA:ouIfl:l‘I'b:Iay 1 17