JFK video: hear Kennedy's 'lost' Dallas speech in his own voice

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: March 25, 2018 at 8:12:03 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] JFK video: hear Kennedy's 'lost' Dallas speech in his own voice
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> JFK video: hear Kennedy’s ‘lost’ Dallas speech in his own voice
> On November 22, 1963 John F Kennedy was silenced. Fifty-five years later we have made it possible for him to be heard 
> again
> By Aaron Rogan
> Mar 15 2018
> <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/jfk-video-hear-kennedys-lost-dallas-speech-in-his-own-voice-xtkvhm255>
>
> It took eight weeks to bring to life the 2,590 words John F Kennedy never got to speak.
>
> Sound engineers pulled 116,777 sound units from 831 of his speeches and radio addresses. These units were then split 
> in half and analysed for pitch and energy. The half units, known as phones, were each about 0.04 seconds long and had 
> to be tested next to each other to ensure that they did not clash. The W sound in weapons, for example, is not the 
> same as the W sound in words.
>
> “There are only 40/45 phones in English so once you’ve got that set you can generate any word in the English 
> language. The problem is that it would not sound natural because one sound merges into the sound next to it so 
> they’re not really independent. You really need the sounds in the context of every other sound and that makes the 
> database big,” Chris Pidcock, co-founder and chief voice engineer at CereProc in Edinburgh, said.
>
> How the speech was recreated
> Mr Pidcock’s company specialises in text-to-voice technology. It is used by brands to bring characters and products 
> to life and also to allow people who are losing the power of speech from motor neurone disease or other conditions to 
> maintain their own voice, something that is also part of their character.
>
> He has previously recreated Roger Ebert’s voice, at a time when the late American film critic had lost his speech 
> because of cancer. That project involved trawling hundreds of hours of film commentaries from DVDs.
>
> Recreating Kennedy’s voice and unique cadence for the JFK Unsilenced project, to produce the speech he was due to 
> give on the day he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, proved a more difficult challenge. “Because of the old 
> analogue recording devices used, it appeared as if it was a different person speaking each time. Trying to harmonise 
> the environment and manipulate the audio so that it ran together was quite difficult,” Mr Pidcock said.
>
> He estimated that of the final 20-minute speech, fewer than half the audio units were beside each other when they 
> were pulled from recordings.
>
> “Getting to that point is pretty challenging based on the variable audio quality, as well as the speech itself having 
> different qualities and noise levels. One of the things we needed to do is get a very accurate transcription of the 
> audio so that things like ‘umms’ and ‘ehs’ could be labelled and we could make sure the phonetic pieces we got were 
> correct. If you label them incorrectly you might pick the wrong piece and the whole sentence will sound wrong.”
>
> The project involved a painstaking two-month process to pick the best-quality recordings of Kennedy’s voice and cross 
> reference them with the written speech so that any crosstalk or static was not selected.
>
> Once a database of the cleanest sound units was built, a new computer system was employed to recognise and recreate 
> Kennedy’s oratorical style. This required feeding data from his speeches into a computer until it learnt the patterns 
> in his delivery. Then, when the speech was put in, the system could tweak it and make it more natural.
>
> [snip]
>
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