WEBVTT
00:00:28.960 --> 00:00:30.160
Who saw you?
00:00:31.920 --> 00:00:32.320
SHE saw me.
00:00:31.929 --> 00:00:33.200
Whom did she see?
00:00:34.880 --> 00:00:35.200
She saw ME.
00:00:34.890 --> 00:00:37.439
Did she see you or hear you?
00:00:40.079 --> 00:00:40.240
She SAW me.
00:00:40.090 --> 00:00:42.719
Now you have only heard the Voder speak in one voice.
00:00:42.719 --> 00:00:48.799
But the Voder has other voices which you can use when Ms. Harper makes a simple adjustment in his mechanism.
00:00:48.799 --> 00:00:52.479
Helen will you have the Voder say, greetings everybody?
00:00:52.479 --> 00:00:55.280
Greetings everybody.
00:00:55.130 --> 00:00:57.759
Now will you have him repeat that in a high voice?
00:01:00.079 --> 00:01:00.320
Greetings everybody.
00:01:00.090 --> 00:01:01.520
And now in his best bass.
00:01:01.619 --> 00:01:01.619
Greetings everybody.
00:01:17.359 --> 00:01:20.000
It is the summer of 1939. Somewhere a merging band is playing.
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Diesel buses idle.
00:01:22.319 --> 00:01:26.319
Thousands of people are talking at once.
00:01:26.319 --> 00:01:28.799
This is the World's Fair.
00:01:29.359 --> 00:01:32.159
The World of Tomorrow.
00:01:32.159 --> 00:01:36.640
Everywhere you look, someone is staring at something.
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A wooden cabinet that shows moving pictures.
00:01:40.480 --> 00:01:44.640
A seven foot-tall robot that smokes cigarettes.
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It is all very loud.
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Then you step out of the heat into the Bell Telephone pavilion, and the noise falls away.
00:01:56.480 --> 00:01:59.359
There is a stage.
00:01:59.359 --> 00:02:09.280
Behind the stage, a mural, three stories tall, shows a man's face in the Art Deco style.
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Its mouth wide open, sound waves rolling off his lips.
00:02:15.199 --> 00:02:21.039
And beneath that giant shouting man sits a woman.
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She is dressed impeccably.
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She sits with perfect posture at a wooden console that looks like a desk.
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Her hands rest on two small keyboards and her right foot rests on a pedal.
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A man in a suit steps up to the microphone.
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He tells you that the machine in front of you is going to speak.
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Not a recording.
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Not by passing air through a tube.
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There are no vibrating strings.
00:02:54.960 --> 00:03:00.400
This voice is made of nothing but electricity.
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He turns to the woman.
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And she makes the machine talk.
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I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine.
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I want you to try something.
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Put two fingers against your throat and say, ahhh.
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You can feel it buzzing.
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Keep going, but this time change the sound.
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Ahhh-eee. The buzz in your throat didn't change, but everything else does.
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Your tongue moves, your jaw drops, your lips pull back.
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That buzz is your vocal folds.
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Two small flaps of tissue.
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That is the engine and everything above them.
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Your throat, your mouth, your nose.
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It's a room the buzz has to pass through.
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And the shape of the room decides which parts of the buzz get louder and which parts get dampened.
00:04:11.280 --> 00:04:15.120
You change the room, you change the sound.
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The man who figured out how to build that room out of electricity did not want to build a talking machine.
00:04:23.680 --> 00:04:25.199
Not at first.
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Homer Dudley was a preacher's son from Virginia.
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He trained to be a school teacher and he was bad at it.
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He could not keep a classroom quiet, so he quit.
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He went back to school for electrical engineering and got a job at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
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By the late 1920s, voices were traveling across the country on copper wire.
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And copper wire has limits.
00:04:54.240 --> 00:04:56.480
A human voice is big.
00:04:56.480 --> 00:05:01.120
It's a messy signal, and every conversation takes up room.
00:05:01.120 --> 00:05:06.480
Bell wanted to fit more conversations into their wires.
00:05:06.480 --> 00:05:12.959
So around 1928, Dudley stopped asking how to carry a voice more faithfully.
00:05:12.959 --> 00:05:17.279
And instead, he started asking what a voice is made of.
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In his notes, he describes a person talking almost as if they were a piece of telephone equipment.
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The brain writes the message.
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The mouth and tongue shape it.
00:05:29.519 --> 00:05:37.040
And the buzz in the throat is just the carrier, the thing that gets the message from one head to another.
00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:42.800
Once you see it that way, you can do something strange to a voice.
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You can start to take it apart.
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Dudley built a machine called the Vocoder, or the voice coder.
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You speak into one end, but instead of carrying your voice, the machine measures it.
00:06:01.279 --> 00:06:09.920
There's the pitch and how much energy is in the low frequencies, how much is in the high one.
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Just a handful of numbers changing slowly, like settings on a dial.
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Those numbers go down the wire.
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Not your voice, just the settings.
00:06:22.639 --> 00:06:32.079
On the other end, another machine makes its own buzz and applies your settings, and out comes something that sounds like you.
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And if the shape of the room is just a set of numbers, you can change the numbers.
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Raise the pitch.
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Flatten it. You can build a voice that belongs to no one.
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When Bell started planning its pavilion for the fair, they wanted to show off the Vocoder.
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But there was nothing to see.
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A voice goes in one side and something like a voice comes out the other.
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Standing next to the smoking robot, it was not something that would draw a crowd.
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So someone had an idea.
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What if you threw away the half that listens and keep only the half that speaks?
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So instead of having a machine set the dials, you could put a person at the controls instead.
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A person could learn to press keys to make the room the right shape, and then play it like an organ or something.
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But there was a problem.
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The instrument didn't exist yet, and no one knew how to play it.
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In the summer of 1937, Bell brought ten women from its transcription department into the lab.
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Typists and stenographers.
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That seemed promising.
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The prototype did have keys.
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The engineers judged two of the ten to be, and this is their word, unsuited.
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The other eight weren't considered especially promising either, though two or three might improve with time.
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But while the women were learning the machine, the machine was learning them.
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The keys were too far apart.
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Several of the women said so.
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The keys traveled too far when you pressed them.
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An engineer wrote in his notes that the operators might do better if they didn't have to press so much.
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And then there was the pedal.
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It controlled pitch.
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If you wanted a voice to go up, what does your foot do?
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Do you press it down?
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Or does it make more sense to lift it?
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The machine was still being invented around the bodies of the people who were learning to use it.
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When it was finished, Belle went looking for the women who could master it.
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Not typists this time, but telephone operators.
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Around 320 of them tried.
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These were women who spent their days at switchboards, pulling and plugging in thick cables, connecting one voice to another.
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They were trained to be clear, to be pleasant, and to disappear.
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Twenty-four women were selected.
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The press called them girls.
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The telephone girls.
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But eventually they did have a name.
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They were called the Voderettes.
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And the one at the front of the room, the one who would train the rest, was Helen Harper.
00:10:06.100 --> 00:10:06.100
Ms. Harper I've been wondering whether our listeners realize how many motions you have to make in the production of a single word. Can you give us some idea?
00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:08.240
Well for example in producing the word concentration on the Voder I have to form thirteen different sounds in succession, make five up and down movements of the wrist bar, and vary the position of the foot pedal from three to five times according to what expression I want the Voder to give the word.
00:10:11.279 --> 00:10:18.080
There were ten white keys, one for each finger that shaped the vowel.
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Three black keys for the hard sounds.
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The P, the D, the K.
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A bar under her left wrist.
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Push it one way and the machine buzzes.
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Push it the other way and it hisses.
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Buzz is a voice and a hiss is a breath.
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Every S, every F, every whispered word is a hiss.
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And her right foot was on a pedal, raising and lowering the pitch.
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Without the pedal, every sentence is flat.
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The pedal is the difference between a statement and a question.
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Between calm and afraid.
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To say one word, she has to take it apart in her head.
00:11:07.919 --> 00:11:10.559
Separate the breath from the voice.
00:11:10.559 --> 00:11:21.039
Send the vowels to her fingers, the breath to her wrist, feeling to her foot, and do it all in the time that it takes to say a word.
00:11:21.039 --> 00:11:27.039
The Voderettes practiced for three hours a day.
00:11:27.039 --> 00:11:30.240
They had lessons several times a week.
00:11:30.240 --> 00:11:34.240
And they did this for more than a year.
00:11:34.240 --> 00:11:42.080
They had to first learn single sounds, and then they had to learn to put them next to each other.
00:11:42.080 --> 00:11:47.679
Because a T sounds different before an E than before an O.
00:11:47.679 --> 00:11:50.879
And the women had to learn to hear that.
00:11:50.879 --> 00:11:56.720
They had to hear the sounds that we swallow and the ones that we barely notice.
00:11:56.720 --> 00:12:00.559
They learned to make the voice whisper.
00:12:00.559 --> 00:12:03.679
They learned to make it sound old.
00:12:03.679 --> 00:12:11.919
By the time Helen Harper sat down under the shouting man, she could make it say a sentence in French.
00:12:11.919 --> 00:12:14.799
She could make it moo like a cow.
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And she could make it sing.
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Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot in the days of auld lang syne?
00:12:47.370 --> 00:12:49.600
The fair closed in October of 1940. The pavilion came down.
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The console was packed away.
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Homer Dudley went back to the lab.
00:12:58.960 --> 00:13:05.120
But the idea of the voice as a set of numbers, it went to war.
00:13:05.120 --> 00:13:11.440
Bell used it to scramble the telephone calls between Roosevelt and Churchill.
00:13:11.440 --> 00:13:19.120
Dudley worked on that too, alongside a young British mathematician named Alan Turing.
00:13:19.120 --> 00:13:42.799
The machine didn't quite make it into the archive.
00:13:42.799 --> 00:13:46.000
None of the consoles survived.
00:13:46.000 --> 00:13:54.399
Somewhere between 1940 and now, in one move or another, the desks with the keyboards got lost.
00:13:54.399 --> 00:14:04.480
But in December 2015, in a storage room in Warren, New Jersey, archivists uncovered two tall equipment racks.
00:14:04.480 --> 00:14:09.919
They were the practice units, the ones the women had learned on.
00:14:09.919 --> 00:14:15.519
The thing she performed on was gone, but the thing she practiced on was found.
00:14:15.519 --> 00:14:17.919
And then there's Helen.
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In September of 1941, a newspaper reported that she was retiring from operator work.
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She was already married, and now she told the reporter she was going to make marriage her career.
00:14:31.679 --> 00:14:34.799
She had made a scrapbook, though.
00:14:34.799 --> 00:14:40.240
More than a hundred pages of memories about playing the Voder.
00:14:40.240 --> 00:14:46.559
I don't know what happened to Helen's scrapbook, and I don't know what she put on those pages.
00:14:46.559 --> 00:14:51.039
But when she left, she had gathered something she wanted to keep.
00:14:51.039 --> 00:15:05.840
Every voice you hear from a machine today, the one that reads you directions, the one that can say your grandmother's name is lifeless.
00:15:09.440 --> 00:15:15.200
But the Voder sat there humming until a woman put her hands on it.
00:15:15.200 --> 00:15:20.399
Back in the pavilion, the crowd is laughing.
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The machine has just said good afternoon.
00:15:24.240 --> 00:15:29.360
Someone in the crowd asks it to say it again, but sadder this time.
00:15:29.360 --> 00:15:35.600
Helen changes the pressure on her foot, and it does.
00:15:35.600 --> 00:15:42.879
Above her, the painted man is shouting, and her mouth is closed.
00:15:42.879 --> 00:15:50.639
I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine.
00:15:50.639 --> 00:16:00.720
Today's episode was brought to you exclusively by our founding Patreon members.
00:16:00.720 --> 00:16:09.440
You can go to found in the machine.com /support to find our Patreon and other ways you can support the show.
00:16:09.440 --> 00:16:18.639
And I can't tell you how much I would appreciate a rating or a review wherever you listen to this show.
00:16:18.639 --> 00:16:25.919
Thanks so much for listening.
00:00:28.960 --> 00:00:30.160
Who saw you?
00:00:31.920 --> 00:00:32.320
SHE saw me.
00:00:31.929 --> 00:00:33.200
Whom did she see?
00:00:34.880 --> 00:00:35.200
She saw ME.
00:00:34.890 --> 00:00:37.439
Did she see you or hear you?
00:00:40.079 --> 00:00:40.240
She SAW me.
00:00:40.090 --> 00:00:42.719
Now you have only heard the Voder speak in one voice.
00:00:42.719 --> 00:00:48.799
But the Voder has other voices which you can use when Ms. Harper makes a simple adjustment in his mechanism.
00:00:48.799 --> 00:00:52.479
Helen will you have the Voder say, greetings everybody?
00:00:52.479 --> 00:00:55.280
Greetings everybody.
00:00:55.130 --> 00:00:57.759
Now will you have him repeat that in a high voice?
00:01:00.079 --> 00:01:00.320
Greetings everybody.
00:01:00.090 --> 00:01:01.520
And now in his best bass.
00:01:01.619 --> 00:01:01.619
Greetings everybody.
00:01:17.359 --> 00:01:20.000
It is the summer of 1939. Somewhere a merging band is playing.
00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:22.319
Diesel buses idle.
00:01:22.319 --> 00:01:26.319
Thousands of people are talking at once.
00:01:26.319 --> 00:01:28.799
This is the World's Fair.
00:01:29.359 --> 00:01:32.159
The World of Tomorrow.
00:01:32.159 --> 00:01:36.640
Everywhere you look, someone is staring at something.
00:01:36.640 --> 00:01:40.480
A wooden cabinet that shows moving pictures.
00:01:40.480 --> 00:01:44.640
A seven foot-tall robot that smokes cigarettes.
00:01:44.640 --> 00:01:47.120
It is all very loud.
00:01:47.120 --> 00:01:56.480
Then you step out of the heat into the Bell Telephone pavilion, and the noise falls away.
00:01:56.480 --> 00:01:59.359
There is a stage.
00:01:59.359 --> 00:02:09.280
Behind the stage, a mural, three stories tall, shows a man's face in the Art Deco style.
00:02:09.280 --> 00:02:15.199
Its mouth wide open, sound waves rolling off his lips.
00:02:15.199 --> 00:02:21.039
And beneath that giant shouting man sits a woman.
00:02:21.039 --> 00:02:23.599
She is dressed impeccably.
00:02:23.599 --> 00:02:29.599
She sits with perfect posture at a wooden console that looks like a desk.
00:02:29.599 --> 00:02:35.360
Her hands rest on two small keyboards and her right foot rests on a pedal.
00:02:35.360 --> 00:02:40.240
A man in a suit steps up to the microphone.
00:02:40.240 --> 00:02:45.120
He tells you that the machine in front of you is going to speak.
00:02:45.120 --> 00:02:48.000
Not a recording.
00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:52.000
Not by passing air through a tube.
00:02:52.000 --> 00:02:54.960
There are no vibrating strings.
00:02:54.960 --> 00:03:00.400
This voice is made of nothing but electricity.
00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:03.759
He turns to the woman.
00:03:03.759 --> 00:03:07.520
And she makes the machine talk.
00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:14.080
I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine.
00:03:14.960 --> 00:03:20.319
I want you to try something.
00:03:20.319 --> 00:03:24.719
Put two fingers against your throat and say, ahhh.
00:03:24.719 --> 00:03:29.120
You can feel it buzzing.
00:03:29.120 --> 00:03:33.120
Keep going, but this time change the sound.
00:03:33.120 --> 00:03:42.319
Ahhh-eee. The buzz in your throat didn't change, but everything else does.
00:03:42.319 --> 00:03:47.039
Your tongue moves, your jaw drops, your lips pull back.
00:03:47.039 --> 00:03:50.400
That buzz is your vocal folds.
00:03:50.400 --> 00:03:53.120
Two small flaps of tissue.
00:03:53.120 --> 00:03:57.039
That is the engine and everything above them.
00:03:57.039 --> 00:04:00.159
Your throat, your mouth, your nose.
00:04:00.159 --> 00:04:04.000
It's a room the buzz has to pass through.
00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:11.280
And the shape of the room decides which parts of the buzz get louder and which parts get dampened.
00:04:11.280 --> 00:04:15.120
You change the room, you change the sound.
00:04:15.120 --> 00:04:23.680
The man who figured out how to build that room out of electricity did not want to build a talking machine.
00:04:23.680 --> 00:04:25.199
Not at first.
00:04:25.199 --> 00:04:30.319
Homer Dudley was a preacher's son from Virginia.
00:04:30.319 --> 00:04:34.240
He trained to be a school teacher and he was bad at it.
00:04:34.240 --> 00:04:38.079
He could not keep a classroom quiet, so he quit.
00:04:38.079 --> 00:04:44.240
He went back to school for electrical engineering and got a job at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
00:04:44.240 --> 00:04:51.360
By the late 1920s, voices were traveling across the country on copper wire.
00:04:51.360 --> 00:04:54.240
And copper wire has limits.
00:04:54.240 --> 00:04:56.480
A human voice is big.
00:04:56.480 --> 00:05:01.120
It's a messy signal, and every conversation takes up room.
00:05:01.120 --> 00:05:06.480
Bell wanted to fit more conversations into their wires.
00:05:06.480 --> 00:05:12.959
So around 1928, Dudley stopped asking how to carry a voice more faithfully.
00:05:12.959 --> 00:05:17.279
And instead, he started asking what a voice is made of.
00:05:17.279 --> 00:05:24.000
In his notes, he describes a person talking almost as if they were a piece of telephone equipment.
00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:27.040
The brain writes the message.
00:05:27.040 --> 00:05:29.519
The mouth and tongue shape it.
00:05:29.519 --> 00:05:37.040
And the buzz in the throat is just the carrier, the thing that gets the message from one head to another.
00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:42.800
Once you see it that way, you can do something strange to a voice.
00:05:42.800 --> 00:05:45.439
You can start to take it apart.
00:05:45.439 --> 00:05:53.439
Dudley built a machine called the Vocoder, or the voice coder.
00:05:53.439 --> 00:06:01.279
You speak into one end, but instead of carrying your voice, the machine measures it.
00:06:01.279 --> 00:06:09.920
There's the pitch and how much energy is in the low frequencies, how much is in the high one.
00:06:09.920 --> 00:06:15.920
Just a handful of numbers changing slowly, like settings on a dial.
00:06:15.920 --> 00:06:19.279
Those numbers go down the wire.
00:06:19.279 --> 00:06:22.639
Not your voice, just the settings.
00:06:22.639 --> 00:06:32.079
On the other end, another machine makes its own buzz and applies your settings, and out comes something that sounds like you.
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And if the shape of the room is just a set of numbers, you can change the numbers.
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Raise the pitch.
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Flatten it. You can build a voice that belongs to no one.
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When Bell started planning its pavilion for the fair, they wanted to show off the Vocoder.
00:07:04.959 --> 00:07:07.839
But there was nothing to see.
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A voice goes in one side and something like a voice comes out the other.
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Standing next to the smoking robot, it was not something that would draw a crowd.
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So someone had an idea.
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What if you threw away the half that listens and keep only the half that speaks?
00:07:30.639 --> 00:07:38.879
So instead of having a machine set the dials, you could put a person at the controls instead.
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A person could learn to press keys to make the room the right shape, and then play it like an organ or something.
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But there was a problem.
00:07:51.600 --> 00:07:58.079
The instrument didn't exist yet, and no one knew how to play it.
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In the summer of 1937, Bell brought ten women from its transcription department into the lab.
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Typists and stenographers.
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That seemed promising.
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The prototype did have keys.
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The engineers judged two of the ten to be, and this is their word, unsuited.
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The other eight weren't considered especially promising either, though two or three might improve with time.
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But while the women were learning the machine, the machine was learning them.
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The keys were too far apart.
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Several of the women said so.
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The keys traveled too far when you pressed them.
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An engineer wrote in his notes that the operators might do better if they didn't have to press so much.
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And then there was the pedal.
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It controlled pitch.
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If you wanted a voice to go up, what does your foot do?
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Do you press it down?
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Or does it make more sense to lift it?
00:09:04.399 --> 00:09:11.120
The machine was still being invented around the bodies of the people who were learning to use it.
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When it was finished, Belle went looking for the women who could master it.
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Not typists this time, but telephone operators.
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Around 320 of them tried.
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These were women who spent their days at switchboards, pulling and plugging in thick cables, connecting one voice to another.
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They were trained to be clear, to be pleasant, and to disappear.
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Twenty-four women were selected.
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The press called them girls.
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The telephone girls.
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But eventually they did have a name.
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They were called the Voderettes.
00:09:56.799 --> 00:10:06.000
And the one at the front of the room, the one who would train the rest, was Helen Harper.
00:10:06.100 --> 00:10:06.100
Ms. Harper I've been wondering whether our listeners realize how many motions you have to make in the production of a single word. Can you give us some idea?
00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:08.240
Well for example in producing the word concentration on the Voder I have to form thirteen different sounds in succession, make five up and down movements of the wrist bar, and vary the position of the foot pedal from three to five times according to what expression I want the Voder to give the word.
00:10:11.279 --> 00:10:18.080
There were ten white keys, one for each finger that shaped the vowel.
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Three black keys for the hard sounds.
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The P, the D, the K.
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A bar under her left wrist.
00:10:29.360 --> 00:10:32.559
Push it one way and the machine buzzes.
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Push it the other way and it hisses.
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Buzz is a voice and a hiss is a breath.
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Every S, every F, every whispered word is a hiss.
00:10:46.879 --> 00:10:52.639
And her right foot was on a pedal, raising and lowering the pitch.
00:10:52.639 --> 00:10:56.000
Without the pedal, every sentence is flat.
00:10:56.000 --> 00:11:00.399
The pedal is the difference between a statement and a question.
00:11:00.399 --> 00:11:03.279
Between calm and afraid.
00:11:03.279 --> 00:11:07.919
To say one word, she has to take it apart in her head.
00:11:07.919 --> 00:11:10.559
Separate the breath from the voice.
00:11:10.559 --> 00:11:21.039
Send the vowels to her fingers, the breath to her wrist, feeling to her foot, and do it all in the time that it takes to say a word.
00:11:21.039 --> 00:11:27.039
The Voderettes practiced for three hours a day.
00:11:27.039 --> 00:11:30.240
They had lessons several times a week.
00:11:30.240 --> 00:11:34.240
And they did this for more than a year.
00:11:34.240 --> 00:11:42.080
They had to first learn single sounds, and then they had to learn to put them next to each other.
00:11:42.080 --> 00:11:47.679
Because a T sounds different before an E than before an O.
00:11:47.679 --> 00:11:50.879
And the women had to learn to hear that.
00:11:50.879 --> 00:11:56.720
They had to hear the sounds that we swallow and the ones that we barely notice.
00:11:56.720 --> 00:12:00.559
They learned to make the voice whisper.
00:12:00.559 --> 00:12:03.679
They learned to make it sound old.
00:12:03.679 --> 00:12:11.919
By the time Helen Harper sat down under the shouting man, she could make it say a sentence in French.
00:12:11.919 --> 00:12:14.799
She could make it moo like a cow.
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And she could make it sing.
00:12:47.360 --> 00:12:47.679
Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot in the days of auld lang syne?
00:12:47.370 --> 00:12:49.600
The fair closed in October of 1940. The pavilion came down.
00:12:49.600 --> 00:12:55.279
The console was packed away.
00:12:55.279 --> 00:12:58.960
Homer Dudley went back to the lab.
00:12:58.960 --> 00:13:05.120
But the idea of the voice as a set of numbers, it went to war.
00:13:05.120 --> 00:13:11.440
Bell used it to scramble the telephone calls between Roosevelt and Churchill.
00:13:11.440 --> 00:13:19.120
Dudley worked on that too, alongside a young British mathematician named Alan Turing.
00:13:19.120 --> 00:13:42.799
The machine didn't quite make it into the archive.
00:13:42.799 --> 00:13:46.000
None of the consoles survived.
00:13:46.000 --> 00:13:54.399
Somewhere between 1940 and now, in one move or another, the desks with the keyboards got lost.
00:13:54.399 --> 00:14:04.480
But in December 2015, in a storage room in Warren, New Jersey, archivists uncovered two tall equipment racks.
00:14:04.480 --> 00:14:09.919
They were the practice units, the ones the women had learned on.
00:14:09.919 --> 00:14:15.519
The thing she performed on was gone, but the thing she practiced on was found.
00:14:15.519 --> 00:14:17.919
And then there's Helen.
00:14:17.919 --> 00:14:25.360
In September of 1941, a newspaper reported that she was retiring from operator work.
00:14:25.360 --> 00:14:31.679
She was already married, and now she told the reporter she was going to make marriage her career.
00:14:31.679 --> 00:14:34.799
She had made a scrapbook, though.
00:14:34.799 --> 00:14:40.240
More than a hundred pages of memories about playing the Voder.
00:14:40.240 --> 00:14:46.559
I don't know what happened to Helen's scrapbook, and I don't know what she put on those pages.
00:14:46.559 --> 00:14:51.039
But when she left, she had gathered something she wanted to keep.
00:14:51.039 --> 00:15:05.840
Every voice you hear from a machine today, the one that reads you directions, the one that can say your grandmother's name is lifeless.
00:15:09.440 --> 00:15:15.200
But the Voder sat there humming until a woman put her hands on it.
00:15:15.200 --> 00:15:20.399
Back in the pavilion, the crowd is laughing.
00:15:20.399 --> 00:15:24.240
The machine has just said good afternoon.
00:15:24.240 --> 00:15:29.360
Someone in the crowd asks it to say it again, but sadder this time.
00:15:29.360 --> 00:15:35.600
Helen changes the pressure on her foot, and it does.
00:15:35.600 --> 00:15:42.879
Above her, the painted man is shouting, and her mouth is closed.
00:15:42.879 --> 00:15:50.639
I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine.
00:15:50.639 --> 00:16:00.720
Today's episode was brought to you exclusively by our founding Patreon members.
00:16:00.720 --> 00:16:09.440
You can go to found in the machine.com /support to find our Patreon and other ways you can support the show.
00:16:09.440 --> 00:16:18.639
And I can't tell you how much I would appreciate a rating or a review wherever you listen to this show.
00:16:18.639 --> 00:16:25.919
Thanks so much for listening.
