About Melissa Watterworth Batt

Archivist for Literary Manuscripts, Natural History Collections and Rare Books Collections, Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries

How would YOU modernize FOIA and strengthen open government? @OpenGov needs your input!

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Attaching envelopes to and releasing balloons, 1932. Photograph by Jerauld A. Manter. University Photograph Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Libraries.

In a few months the United States will publish its third Open Government National Action Plan (NAP) including new and expanded open government initiatives to pursue from 2016 through 2018. The US is part of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a global effort to make governments more open and accountable to the public. Countries that participate in OGP are required to develop and carry out action plans that include concrete commitments to make the government more open. “These plans are a true team effort — governments work alongside civil society in all 65 OGP countries to develop and implement the efforts within the plans, ” according to the latest blog post from Corinna Zarek, the US rep to the OGP.

How can you contribute?

Share NAP suggestions via email at opengov@ostp.gov or tweet @OpenGov.

You can also contribute ideas to a publicly available Hackpad — an open, collaborative platform — that the General Services Administration is helping coordinate. (You will need to create an account on that site before viewing and contributing to content on that platform.)

Add your voice and your input! According to OpenGov, all suggestions including expanded commitments on topic areas from the first two plans such as public participation, open data, records management, natural resource revenue transparency, the Freedom of Information Act, open innovation, or open educational resources, are welcome. You may also wish to suggest entirely new initiatives.

Read more about the campaign at The National Archives FOIA Ombudsman blog and the Open Government Initiative site.

Hello From New Graduate Student Intern Nick Hurley

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

by Nick Hurley, Graduate Summer Intern

Hello! My name is Nick Hurley, and I was lucky enough to be selected as the Archives and Special Collections Graduate Intern for summer 2015. I am currently one semester away from earning a Master’s Degree in History, and received my B.A. in History from UCONN as well. This past Monday marked not only my first day as an archives intern, but my first foray into the field of archival studies and management. For the foreseeable future, my focus will be the Bruce A. Morrison Papers.

Bruce A. Morrison is a former Congressman from Connecticut who served from 1983-1991. While in office he served as Chairman of the House Immigration subcommittee, and authored the now-famous Immigration Act of 1990. After an unsuccessful campaign for Governor of CT in 1990, Morrison became 20150615Nickblog03 heavily involved in the quest for peace in Northern Ireland, and was instrumental in paving the way for the eventual IRA ceasefires in 1994 and 1997. During this time he also served as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Board, and as a commissioner on the Commission for Immigration Reform (1992-1997). A lawyer by profession, Morrison founded a lobbying firm after leaving public office in 2000, and continues to remain active in Irish-American advocacy. He lives today in Maryland.

I’ll be looking through Mr. Morrison’s papers and arranging the collection (some 110 boxes!) in preparation for digitization (to include updating the online finding aid.) Once that is complete, the physical documents will go back into the stacks, and the digital copies will be added to
Archives and Special Collections digital repository. I’m excited to be following the collection through every aspect of the archival process, from start to finish. I think it will be a great way for me to make the best use of my time here, and I can already tell from the work I’ve been doing that I’ll 20150615Nickblog02 be learning a lot about archives organization and classification: what belongs, what doesn’t, and how to group certain documents together in a way that makes sense to both an archivist and potential researchers.

But I’m also hoping to become familiar with the more technical aspects of archival work, because I’ve had almost no exposure to them until now. If I can leave here in August with a good understanding of how materials are digitized and loaded into a digital database, and a lot of experience navigating and utilizing collection management systems like the Archivists’ Toolkit, I’ll consider the summer a success! Moreover, I’ll feel much better prepared to apply for jobs at museums and archives that require some level of experience.

In addition to my internship here at the archives, I will be volunteering at the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Connecticut from June-August. Following graduation, I hope to enter the field of Public History through employment at a museum or similar institution. I am a lifelong resident of CT, born and raised in Glastonbury.

I’ll be posting on here from time to time with updates as the summer—and my project on the Morrison Papers—progresses. Stay tuned!

Black Mountain: An Interdisciplinary Experiment Opens at Nationalgalerie Berlin

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

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The first comprehensive exhibition in Germany devoted to the legendary Black Mountain College opened this weekend at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie in Berlin amid a large crowd and a flurry of interest. The large exhibition showcases archival materials loaned from a variety of repositories in the United States and Europe, and we are thrilled to have materials produced at Black Mountain College exhibited from collections held here in Archives and Special Collections included in the exhibition.

Black Mountain. An Interdisciplinary Experiment 1933 – 1957 encompasses works of art and craft, photography, performance and literature produced at Black Mountain College. Live readings, documentary film, and student programming promise to engage visitors throughout the exhibition which runs from June 5 until September 27, 2015.

In cooperation with the Freie Universität Berlin and the Dahlem Humanities Center, the exhibition at the Nationalgalerie in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum traces the history of the small college founded in 1933 in North Carolina from its early experimental stages through the artists and teachers that shaped it in years following World War II. “Its influence upon the development of the arts in the second half of the 20th century was enormous; the performatisation of the arts, in particular, that emerged as from the 1950s derived vital impetus from the experimental practice at Black Mountain,” according to the exhibition curators.

Within an architectural environment designed by the architects’ collective raumlabor_berlin, the exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof is showing works both by teachers at the college, such as Josef and Anni Albers, Richard Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Shoji Hamada, Franz Kline, Xanti Schawinsky and Jack Tworkov, and by a number of Black Mountain students, including Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson, Ursula Mamlok, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne and Cy Twombly. A wealth of photographs and documentary film footage, as well as publications produced by the college, offer an insight into the way in which the institute worked and into life on campus.

…

In the first few years of its existence, the college was strongly shaped by German and European émigrés – among them several former Bauhaus members such as Josef and Anni Albers, Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky and Walter Gropius. After the Second World War, the creative impulses issued increasingly from young American artists and academics, who commuted between rural Black Mountain and the urban centres on the East and West Coast. Right up to its closure in 1957, the college remained imbued with the ideas of European modernism, the philosophy of American pragmatism and teaching methods that aimed to encourage personal initiative as well as the social competence of the individual.

Accompanying the exhibition is the artistic project Performing the Black Mountain Archive by Arnold Dreyblatt, a Berlin-based media artist and composer currently teaching as Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel. The project incorporates the live performance of archival material Dreyblatt collected in the Black Mountain Archives in the United States. Including students from different disciplines like sculpture, painting, media art, sound art, music, dance, theater, typography and literature, the project “investigates the interdisciplinarity of Black Mountain’s pedagogical approach.” Dreyblatt invited students from ten European art academies – amongst them his own class – who present the material in the form of readings, concerts and performances over the entire duration of the exhibition. Dreyblatt was interviewed recently about the project by Verena Kittel of Black Mountain Research, based at the Museum.

Stay tuned for information regarding another exhibition featuring Black Mountain College materials, loaned from Archives and Special Collections, this October at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. Details can be found on their forthcoming exhibitions site!

World Conference on Women: Exhibition Marks 25th Anniversary

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

by Matt Jones, Graduate Student Library Assistant in Archives and Special Collections

2015 marks the twenty-year anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women held 4-15 September, 1995 in Beijing, China. The previous world conferences occurred in 1975 (Mexico City), 1980 (Copenhagen), and 1985 (Nairobi). While there do not appear to be concrete plans for a fifth conference, a series of events, colloquia, and reflections are currently taking place around the world under the aegis of Beijing +20.

A new exhibition in Archives and Special Collections’ Reading Room showcases original media programs, uconn_asc_reaching_outREV agendas, and country-specific notes for delegates from the 1995 Conference. Also on display are materials published in response to or in anticipation of the conference including editorials, news bulletins, fliers, and response booklets. These materials represent a small but helpful glimpse into not only the conference itself but also a number of cultural conflicts that arose when approaching these topics as well as calls for ever greater activity and solidarity from their being brought to international light.

Items featured in the display are from the Human Rights Internet Collection (HRI) housed in the Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. The collection contains thousands of publications and rare pamphlets from around the world collected from 1977 to the present by Human Rights Internet, a non-governmental organization based out of Ottawa, Canada. The collection includes materials not found in any other libraries in North America, and includes publications in a variety of languages including English, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Swedish, Chinese and Japanese. Many publications are cataloged and searchable through HOMER, the library’s online public catalog.

Much of the international response addressed concerns regarding how to interpret the twelve points of the Beijing Plan for Action (listed below). Some voices, such as that coming from Amnesty International, advocated for more direct action in response to the twelve points. Others, such as the Members from Developed Countries of the NGO Coalition for Women and the Family, voiced anxieties that the Platform for Action would compromise traditional values. Others still, such as The Globe and Mail, express concerns stemming from the conference being held in China. A pamphlet released by Human Rights Watch and directed at delegates attending the conference explains how to effectively navigate China and its “government contrls on freedom of expression, association, assembly and religion” is on display in the exhibition.

1995 World Conference on Women – Beijing Plan for Action:

Women and Poverty
Education and Training of Women
Women and Health
Violence against Women
Women and Armed Conflict
Women and the Economy
Women in Power and Decision-making
Institutional Mechanism for the Advancement of Women
Human Rights of Women
Women and the Media
Women and the Environment
The Girl-child

For more on the 1995 Beijing conference and on current activity relating to its twenty year anniversary you can visit these websites:

http://beijing20.unwomen.org/en

http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/

http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/index.html

Archivist Graham Stinnett featured on Queer!NEA

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

I believe in the principles of archives as tools for engagement with a broader societal understanding of itself and how it can be leveraged for change in society, so building on these collecting areas is very beneficial. We are always being documented, it is our job to engage the creation of memory from that documentation.

Check out the latest post on Queer!NEA, a blog for New England Archivists’ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Issues Roundtable, featuring an interview with our very own Graham Stinnett, Archivist for Human Rights and Alternative Press Collections. Graham tells us about his professional interests and the array of activities that occupy his days here at UConn with students and faculty. He also reflects on the critical, tangible value of archives today “to promote the dialectic between the then and now”…

When considering the basis of text communication in social media platforms today which could be the closest comparison to the channels of alternative press, these outlets have more in common than they do in division. My goal is to promote the dialectic between then and now. Beyond the narrative that all movements toward rights are valuable and worth documenting, my interest has been to promote the intersections where students have made impacts through documentation in the past which now can inform the present context of identity, recreation, sociability and agency. Having said all that, I don’t think we as archivists have yet understood how to deal with today’s alternative press, which is why these conversations are so important.

Independent Voices Now Accessible

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

A large archive of digital Alternative Press newspapers is now available to UConn students, faculty and staff.

Independent Voices is a digital collection made up of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals from the latter half of the 20th century, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. Archives and Special Collections has been contributing materials from its holdings to the digital archive over the last year. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals and the New Left, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines.

This is a valuable resource for research comprised of what is an increasingly deteriorating paper medium for historically alternative politics and culture In America. Independent Voices can be found in the Human Rights databases through the library webpage.

Laurie Anderson’s Big Science: Gender, Automation, and Created Beings

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

“O Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad,” begins performance artist Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” Half-sung, half-spoken, and captivatingly hypnotic, the eight-minute song featured on Anderson’s 1982 album Big Science reached number two on the U.K. charts in the early 1980s.

Anderson’s work strikes an interesting balance between abstraction and accessibility. Despite the popularity of “O Superman” and the rest of Big Science, Anderson encodes her work with rich references to literary texts, operas, cultural trends and pop culture events. The album most extensively engages with the relationship among communication, technology, and political affairs. “Big Science,” after all, is a term used to describe the shift during and after World War II toward government-funded, large-scale scientific projects principally devoted to the development of new weapons and tools.

Furthering her engagement with technology are the instruments and techniques Anderson uses to produce her music. The spoken text of “O Superman,” for example, is dictated through a vocoder, a synthesizer used to reproduce human speech. Anderson uses the technology to make her voice sound synthetic, therefore mimicking the automatic voice of an answering machine and blurring the assumed boundaries between the natural and the artificial. But the most fascinating aspect of Anderson’s performance art is both its timeliness and timelessness—her songs are just as topically relevant and profound today as they were over thirty years ago.

I had the opportunity to listen to Anderson’s vinyl LP using the Dodd Center’s electronic equipment. I’ve compiled the digitized tracks of Anderson’s Big Science here for those interested in listening at home.

-Giorgina Paiella

Intern Giorgina Paiella is an undergraduate student majoring in English and minoring in philosophy and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. In her new blog series, “Man, Woman, Machine: Gender, Automation, and Created Beings,” she explores treatments of created and automated beings in historical texts and archival materials from Archives and Special Collections.

Earth Day 2015: Wild Beauty Through the Lens of Edwin Way Teale

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

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The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues – self-restraint. Why cannot I take as many trout as I want from a stream? Why cannot I bring home from the woods a rare wildflower? Because if I do, everybody in this democracy should be able to do the same. My act will be multiplied endlessly. To provide protection for wildlife and wild beauty, everyone has to deny himself proportionately. Special privilege and conservation are ever at odds.

Edwin Way Teale, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and naturalist, spent his life observing and recording his vivid experiences in, and encounters with, the natural world. We honor Teale and his legacy this Earth Day 2015 with a selection of photographs from his rich archive being preserved here at UConn. The excerpt is from Teale’s 1953 book Circle of the Seasons. The pictures were selected by Kristin Eshelman, Archivist for Multimedia Collections in Archives and Special Collections.

A Language of Song: Samuel Charters Remembers John Fahey and the Fahey Style

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Within the archive of books, recordings, sheet music, letters, audiovisual materials, and advertising materials assembled by Samuel Charters are the compositions and recordings produced by contemporary blues-based musicians including John Fahey. Rare recordings released on Fahey and Ed Denson’s independent record label Takoma Records, dating from the founding of the record label in 1959, together with Fahey’s later releases, reside in Series IIB of the Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture. Here, Samuel Charters remembers his first encounter with John Fahey and later, with his instrumental and compositional style:

In the summer of 1959 an LP came in the mail to the basement apartment in Brooklyn where I had just finished writing The Country Blues. The record was in a white cover, with only the words “Blind Joe Death” in large letters on both sides. With it there was a letter to me from someone named John Fahey, telling me that this was a record he had made of his own music, and asking me for an opinion. The letter was as guarded as the LP jacket. The music was a series of guitar instrumentals based on the finger picking style of the Mississippi bluesmen. I kept waiting for someone to sing, and when I didn’t hear any singing I wrote John a short note saying that other people in New York were doing the same kind of thing but the record was interesting. John has never forgiven me for my note, and even if I’m not sure if we ever would really have become friends I have always been angry at myself for my insensitivity. John sent out a few copies of the record, which he had pressed for himself on his own Takoma label, and sold more through mail orders.

When the copies were gone he recorded a new record and sold the copies the same way. This time the copies went more quickly, and he recorded a third album. Within a few years Fahey and his music had become one of the growing influences of the 1960s. He was still almost unknown personally, but his music was everywhere in the new underground.

I had difficulty describing the pieces when I first heard the 1959 album, but I soon realized that John had created a new music, based entirely on the materials he had learned from the country blues. He had been one of the people who rediscovered Bukka White, and then Mississippi John Hurt, and from the musicians themselves he had absorbed finger techniques and new concepts of guitar tunings and chordal structures. He has never described himself as a guitarist – his description of his own music is that he is a composer who plays the guitar. What he did was to create a compositional style which synthesized elements from the entire range of rural southern string music, including the Mississippi slide guitar, Virginia string bands, the alternate thumb picking of the Delta, and the finger style of the Carolinas. His compositional technique was to record passages with different guitars which built up segments of his pieces – then he spliced the tape sections together, editing, changing tone, and adding echo effects. His last step was then to learn the piece as it was finally structured so he could perform it.

By the middle of the ‘60s John was touring regularly, and he had outgrown the small record company he had set up with a partner, ED Denson, the man who had gone to Memphis with him to find Bukka White. I had known ED for several years and we worked together to sign John to a contract with Vanguard. There were two albums – the first an album that included three long requia, and an extended three part piece that utilized a complicated sound montage over John’s guitar. We recorded many of the sound effects for the montage at Knott’s Berry Farm outside of Los Angeles, where the events John was depicting in the composition had taken place. Because of time problems and delays from John’s side I finally went ahead and mixed the sound piece without him, and our edgy relationship became even more difficult.

For the second album on the Vanguard contract he worked with a friend, Barry Hansen, in Los Angeles, while I acted as executive producer in New York. The album, The Yellow Princess, was one of John’s finest achievments, with a music concrete piece built on montage, a successful fusion of his guitar with small instrumental groups, and a rich collection of new compositions.

By this time Fahey had a series of disciples, among them Leo Kottke, who developed the idiom John had created into a more flamboyant and emotionally open statement. John was not upset. He recorded Kottke for his own record company, and they continued to be close friends. He was also having emotional problems, and his life often veered into difficulties, despite the growing creativity of his music. By the 1970s an entire school of guitar composition had grown from his work, and a new record company, Windham Hill, was established by a guitarist named Will Ackerman to present young guitarists playing in the Fahey style. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that John’s guitar compositions were the basis for the New Age movement that swept the guitar world, and that the basic foundation for all of it was southern blues guitar.

The series A Language of Song features the words of Samuel Charters and the recordings he produced as preserved in The Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture at the University of Connecticut. The series is a tribute to the great Samuel Charters – poet, novelist, translator of Swedish poets, and renowned scholar of the blues, jazz, and musical culture of the African diaspora. Samuel Charters died on March 18 at the age of 85.

Tomorrow: Fred Ho Fellow Marie Incontrera Performs with the Eco-Music Big Band

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

UConn welcomes Marie Incontrera – conductor and band-leader of the Green Monster Big Band (Fred Ho’s premiere big band) and the Eco-Music Band – to campus tomorrow April 14 at 12:45pm for a public performance. The Eco-Music Big Band is a 15-piece, multi-generational big band that is committed to continuing the prodigious compositional and creative legacy of Fred Ho. The ensemble also performs the works of the overlooked composers of 20th century (such as Cal Massey), and provides a platform for the next generation of big band composers.

Ms. Incontrera has been awarded the 2015 Fred Ho Fellowship, named for Asian American Musician, composer, writer and activist Fred Ho. Established by the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, the Fred Ho Fellowship supports research in the Fred Ho Papers, which are held in Archives and Special Collections at UConn.

Fred Ho’s conducting protégé before his death in April of 2014, Marie Incontrera conducted the Green Monster Big Band for Fred Ho’s final album.

Ms. Incontrera’s work spans queer opera, political big band, and music-for-the-oppressed. As a composer, Marie has been a recipient of the Miriam Gideon Composition Award, a winner of the Remarkable Theater Brigade Art Song Competition, the 2011 Vocalessence / American Composers Forum “Essentially Choral” readings, and a ﬁnalist in the Iron Composer 2010 competition. She has been awarded grants from Meet the Composer Metlife Creative Connections, Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, Pufﬁn, and New York Women Composers Seed Money Grant. Commissions have come from the Young New Yorkers Chorus, Remarkable Theater Brigade, ANALOGarts, Brooklyn Art Song Society, ANIKAI Dance Theater, MOIRAE Ensemble, Beth Morrison Productions, and Atlanta Opera. Her work has been performed in Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Meridian Arts Festival in Bucharest, Roulette, Galapagos Art Space, WOW Cafe Theatre, highSCORE Festival, and other respected venues across the United States and internationally.

The Fred Ho Fellowship provides support to a faculty member, doctoral candidate or independent scholar who has a demonstrated research interest in the Fred Ho Collection. The Fred Ho Fellow is required to give a public lecture at the University of Connecticut and to reference the collection in his or her published works.

@ NYC: Alice Notley Reading / Ed Sanders Drawings and Daybooks / Sharon Olds Pens Poems for You

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Long a hub for hearing the poetry and poetic voices of the now, New York City next week and the week after hosts some of the best poetry events and exhibitions happening during this National Poetry Month.

On Tuesday, April 14, the prolific and prize-winning poet Alice Notley will read her work at the City University of New York Center for the Humanities. Erica Kaufman, editor of the ever-fresh and propitious Lost & Found publication series, an initiative of the CUNY Center for the Humanities, will lead a conversation with Notley during the program.

While you are in the City, see the rarely exhibited notebooks and drawings of the poet, musician, activist Ed Sander s on display at the Poet’s House, located on its serene perch at 10 River Terrace. During the course of a long and diverse career Sanders used a glyphic alphabet, a script of hand-drawn characters, symbols, and graphemes. In his words, “a Glyph is a drawing that is charged with literary, emotional, historical or mythic, and poetic intensity.” Curated by Ammiel Alcalay and Kendra Sullivan, the show displays pictures and manuscripts by Sanders from 1962 to the present.

On Thursday, April 23, Pulitzer Prize-winner Sharon Olds, and Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Poetry Café, will sit in a booth (inspired by Lucy’s booth from the Peanuts comic strip) and write poems for those who request one. The Poet is In: takes place in the new Fulton Street Station and features an array of award-winning poets, including NY State Poet Laureate Marie Howe. Free and open to the public, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Replicating the Human Voice: Gender, Automation and Created Beings

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

“Hello, I’m here.” Throaty, warm, and incredibly human, the first lines spoken by Samantha, the incorporeal female operating system in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, are a far cry from the mechanical voice recognition technologies that we are used to. In addition to its thought provoking philosophical predictions about the near-future, Jonze’s film also hones in on the ideal of voice-replication technology: an artificially intelligent system so natural and intuitive that we can fall in love with it.

Replicating the intricacies of human characteristics and behaviors in non-sentient technologies is far from a new curiosity. Throughout history, automata creators worked to imbue automata with the ability to pen poems, perform acrobatics, play musical instruments, and bat their eyelashes, and these self-operating machines were often admired and judged for their ability to replicate human behaviors. In perhaps the most dramatic fictional interaction with an automaton that blurs the lines separating human from machine, protagonist Nathaniel in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” falls in love with automaton Olympia, whom he mistakes for a human female.

If imitation and replication of human characteristics is one of the driving forces in the creation of artificial beings, it is also one of the greatest challenges. Moving away from automata and toward operating systems and other examples of artificial intelligence, reproduction of human speech is one of the greatest hurdles to clear if we are to produce operating systems like Jonze’s fictional Samantha. The 1981 premiere issue of High Technology affirms that the simulation of human speech has historically been one of the most elusive replication technologies. One article, “Talking Machines Aim For Versatility,”discusses various methods used to replicate speech and reflects upon the value of machines that are capable of producing and understanding human speech.

At the time, most recordings (like the voice on the operator line) consisted of actual recordings of human speech or utilized early word synthesis technologies that tended to sound flat and robotic. Higher-end technologies were very expensive; the Master Specialties model 1650 synthesizer, for example, was $550 for only a one-word vocabulary, and each additional word cost $50, so the technology was very cost restrictive. Technologies have vastly evolved since the time of rudimentary “talking machines,” but the article discusses the potential of speech synthesis and compression technologies that would streamline the process of stringing phonemes (the smallest speech units) into complete sentences, therefore maximizing speech output, concepts which have influenced current speech synthesis techniques. While there are various approaches to “building” voices, the most common technique in the modern day is concatenative synthesis. A voice actor is recorded reading passages of text, random sentences, and words in a variety of cadences, which are then combined with other recording sequences by a text-to-speech engine to form new words and sentences. The technique vastly expands upon the range and comprehensiveness of operating systems like Apple’s Siri.

The High Technology article reflects that because machines would be able to communicate in a form that is natural to humans, they are more equipped to fulfill “the role of mankind’s servants, advisors, and playthings.” Over thirty years later, this goal is still extraordinarily relevant, especially as artificially intelligent systems become more integrated into consumer products like phones, tablets, cars, and security systems. Furthermore, advancements in voice recognition and synthesis technologies have benefitted individuals with impairments who require speech-generating devices to communicate verbally. There are, of course, many challenges that still remain, including the ability of these systems to understand different human accents and dialects. Creating believable artificial speech, however, still harkens back to the greatest challenge in the evolution of these technologies: authenticity. Humans are able to register subtle changes in tone and inflection when we communicate with each other, and these subtleties are currently difficult to replicate in artificially intelligent systems, which explains why we can easily discern a human voice from that of a machine. Jonze’s film suggests that clearing this authenticity hurdle is essential to our ability to truly connect with our technology. Far from the utilitarian “servants, advisors, and playthings” suggested in the High Technology article, intuitive and human-like operating systems could alter our emotional relationship with machines to the extent that they become our confidants and romantic partners.

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