Speech Synthesis

As part of AT&T’s research to improve the quality of telephone transmission, AT&T researcher Homer Dudley tried to electronically break speech into component frequency bands, so he could analyze and manipulate each band separately. By 1936, Dudley completed a device that would do this, and then resynthesize the components into intelligible speech. He called it a vocoder (for voice coder). In addition to being a valuable research tool, the vocoder was an underlying technology for SIGSALY, the first secure telephone system, which AT&T developed so that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could talk across the ocean without fear of German interception. Shortly after completing the vocoder, Dudley extended his work by using artificially generated sounds as the input to the system. This led to the voder, the first speech synthesizer.

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This custom lobby scene, Knowledge Archive, celebrates AT&T’s rich legacy as one of the nation’s most prolific inventors and largest patent holders. Each abstract object surrounding you is a unique data sculpture quite literally derived from the data points of individual AT&T patents. Every sculpture in the lobby is unique and represents one of AT&T’s thousands of patents.

There are six major patent categories, each with its own set of identifiable data sculpture characteristics. This patent is one of many AT&T patents for Customer Experience. The design of this sculpture contains multiple user interface elements – control buttons, knobs and sliders – as an artful representation of the contact point between user and technology.

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