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Why HAL sang “Daisy Bell” in 2001: A Space Odyssey

This video explains why Stanley Kubrick used the song Daisy Bell for the death of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It should also be noted that HAL’s name comes from the letters before IBM.

One of the more famous moments in Bell Labs’ synthetic speech research was the sample created by John L. Kelly in 1962, using an IBM 704 computer. Kelly’s vocoder synthesizer recreated the song “Bicycle Built for Two,” with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Arthur C. Clarke, then visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility, saw this remarkable demonstration and later used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where the HAL9000 computer sings this song as he is disassembled by astronaut Dave Bowman.

Joe Olive, recognized as the leading expert in text-to-speech synthesis, recently contributed a chapter, “The Talking Computer: Text to Speech Synthesis,” to the book “HAL’s Legacy: 2001′s Computer as Dream and Reality,” (M.I.T. Press, 1996), edited by David Stork.

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The video is from a 1963 documentary with Arthur C Clarke about a wired world and artificial intelligence.