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I remember listening to OK Computer some years ago and I must have been studying or something or other and the track "Fitter Happier" came on. Those familiar kn
by jxramos 9y ago
I remember listening to OK Computer some years ago and I must have been studying or something or other and the track "Fitter Happier" came on. Those familiar know how it goes, the Stephen Hawking voice droning on about all these ideals worth pursuing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HimvFbossU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HimvFbossU8). I sat back half listening that evening and this funny response came out in my head, where I responded to the monotone nagging computer's message with "OKaay Computer!". It was interesting because it came out spontaneously in the same sense as "OKaay Mom" in the fashion of perhaps a teenager on some sitcom trying to put an end to his nagging mom's berating him with a bunch of unwelcome or tedious advice. Then I immediately realized the overlap with the album title and thought, "hmmmmmm, is it a commentary on some dystopianish future where the computers nag us humans to get on with some urgent optimum they're trying to press us all into conformity with?"
- surement 9y agoI believe that voice was a built-in Apple text reader.
- pasta 9y agoAs I remember this was done on an Apple computer. In the command line you could do this with they 'say' command. The parameter -v is used for the voice. And I think "Fitter Happier" is 'Fred'. say -v Fred "fitter.happier.more productive" Edit: other sources say it was 'Bruce'. But I don't have an Apple, so I can't check.
- jxramos 9y agothat's cool background. I didn't mean to suggest it was actually the same voice Stephen Hawking utilizes, but just to put forth a popular and familiar sound to imagine with. Though Apple's Fred and Bruce may be the original characters, I'm not sure they'd be as well known as Stephen Hawking but I could be very wrong on that point. I'll try to dig up some Fred and Bruce tracks on YouTube.
- jxramos 9y agoI'm going to lean towards Fred Bruce https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=42 https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=42 Fred https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=49 https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=49
- cyberferret 9y agoMy go to favourite is 'Karen' for the Australian accent. Her voice is far more natural sounding that most of the others I've auditioned, and I use her as the default and pepper all my deployment scripts with 'say' commands now.
- SCdF 9y agoAs a New Zealander, I'm not an Aussie but I am still disappointed she can't say "Strewth" properly! She gets 'arvo' and 'stone the crows' right though, so that's something ;-)
- jxramos 9y agoYou just answered a question I pondered earlier today as I watched the MacOS X demo I linked to above somewhere. And that is to the question if a native speaker would recognize the synthetic speech as unnatural. As the video progresses it lands on international languages such as Arabic and Chinese among other things. To my ear and my best memory of how those languages sound the synthetic versions came out pretty convincing. It made me think about a concept I've had about a test to language recognition: if a native speaker were to speak gibberish in their native tongue would an outsider to the language recognize it as gibberish or assume it was vocabulary in that language.
- tehmaco 9y agoThere's a short film on YouTube that explores that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY It's a very strange experience hearing it!
- wallflower 9y agoThis is a video of Saara who is not a native speaker but who has an extraordinary ability to mimic accents. https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw
- mrmondo 9y ago
- acangiano 9y agoIt's definitely Fred.
- dbattaglia 9y agoAnother clever use was "Kathys Song" by Apoptygma Berzerk, which was named for the Mac "Kathy" speech synthesizer voice used to sing the chorus. Great song too. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oBYrZNZSbf4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oBYrZNZSbf4
- kough 9y agoHa, funny you bring up that track – one of my first late nights programming was soundtracked by Fitter, Happier on repeat. I was so in the flow I didn't even realize it was repeating itself. Only when I sat back to take a break did I notice. The weird thing was the immense wave of depression that broke over me when I did.
- jxramos 9y agosounds like it made you "more productive", ha.
- drunkenmonkey 9y agoIt is not a meaningful coincidence.
- ilamont 9y agoRadiohead also released an EP of OK Computer B-sides called "Airbag / How Am I Driving?" It's absolutely brilliant, but relatively unknown. If you haven't heard it seek it out.
- DalekBaldwin 9y agoIt's included in disc 2 of the re-release.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoYes, it's great!
- mattl 9y agoOn the front cover is a phone number, which when called would go to a voicemail.
- usuallymatt 9y agoYeah I love that EP. The new version of OK Computer (aka OKNOTOK) features all the tracks from the EP as well as 3 previously unreleased tracks that they've played live.
- nurblieh 9y agoYes! It includes a great track called "Palo Alto". As someone who lives in the area I've always been curious how it came about, especially circa 1996/97.
- Aqueous 9y agoOddly enough, Thom Yorke insists the album wasn't about the tedium of the modern world, or the perils of advanced technology, but actually how much he hates traveling [1] [1] http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/exclusive-thom-yorke-and-radiohead-on-ok-computer-w484570 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/exclusive-thom-yo...
- hellofunk 9y agoBut he also loves to pull the wool over our eyes, he's full of inside jokes that only he understands. Take it all with a grain of salt, he entertains himself as much as the rest of us!