The clockwork music of speech: Gestural synthesis in 18th and 19th century speaking machines

Gestural theories of phonology developed in the latter half of the 20th century have proposed that intrinsically timed sequences of linguistically significant actions of the vocal tract are the natural embodiment of speech, in stark contrast to earlier theories that emphasized the role of pure acoustic, auditory or articulatory representations in speech production and perception. Although these recent theories apparently represent a significant change in viewpoint, and have been highly influential, it has been largely forgotten that most of these ideas can actually be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when they were the dominant perspective. Remarkably, early attempts to create speaking robots considered from the outset, and endeavoured to replicate, not only the physics of sound production in realistic vocal tract geometries, but also the sequencing of those geometries over time. This presentation traces the prehistory of gestural synthesis by using unpublished historical documents to analyze the mechanisms used to create the Abbé Mical's Talking Heads, the first programmable speech synthesizer producing the first conversation between machines, and Joseph Faber's Euphonia, the first mechanical synthesizer to transduce timed sequences of symbols into speech. Both of these mechanisms have direct implications for creating 21st century speaking robots.