Can the machine speak? we might once have asked. Can it sing? The question is an old one; as old as Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers herself; or even as old as the first clockwork androids to grace the opera house stages of the Enlightenment.
For half a century now, we have known that the answer is yes. Ever since Arthur C. Clarke visited a friend at Bell Labs and chanced upon an IBM singing, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.” But if this were no more than the artificial parroting of its human masters, like a dog that’ll say sausages if you wiggle its jaw in a certain way, when might we hear a machine intone songs of its very own?
Can the machine sing, as it were, in its own tongue? Recently, for perhaps the first time, I have felt that the answer might just be yes.
Find out why in my latest essay for
The Quietus, I For One Welcome Our New Robot Vocal Cords.