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New dialog for "The Mummy"


Jay Rose

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This mummy isn't a movie, but an actual mummified Egyptian priest from 3000 years ago. Researchers wheeled his remains into a CT scanner, mapped his vocal tract, and 3D-printed a replica of his throat and mouth. They bolted it to a compression horn driver, and claim it reproduces the guy's authentic voice.

 

It makes a good story in today's NYTimes along with a brief audio sample and a link to the research paper in Nature

 

It's also only a story. The mechanism used to create "speech" -- a complex vowel waveform generated by a computer and controlled by a joystick, then sent through a few fixed low-Q resonators in the 3D-printed "mouth" -- is nothing like the way human voices work. We have high-Q resonators, constantly moving to form different filters on the wideband buzz from the vocal folds.

 

Essentially, they've put a non-linear horn on the output of a conventional speech synthesizer. And it's just guesswork, because we have no idea what sounds (or resonances) were used in the priest's language. 

 

The real breakthrough is mapping and printing an ancient mouth, even if it doesn't have the muscles essential for speech. It's a bit more sophisticated than getting a new set of false teeth... but how they made this mouth "talk" is just window dressing.

 

So why am I posting this admittedly speech-nerd story at JWSoundGroup?  Aside from the scientific interest (yes, I do get off on this stuff)...

 

Some producer is going to glance at the Times' article, and then demand we create authentic voices for their next horror film or biblical epic!

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"Some producer is going to glance at the Times' article, and then demand we create authentic voices for their next horror film or biblical epic!"

 

I quite like this idea - its not as if anyone is a position to prove what you create is wrong. Although on another level the authentic meaning of these stories has been argued about ever since their creation ,')

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Jay,

I too saw the article. I had noooo interest in listening to the pain painstakingly, scientifically researched, well reasoned, computer modeled voice. I immediately thought of a Terry Gilliam cartoon also depicting painstaking research by thoughtful scientists.

 

[paraphrasing] Archeologists discovered this dinosaur part in an urban dig site.

Terry%20Gilliam01.png

 

With their collective expertise they were able to reconstruct the ancient beast in its entirety.

Terry%20Gilliam02.png

(credit: Terry Gilliam and PYTHON)

 

Scientists and their computer models make me laugh out loud.

 

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57 minutes ago, PMC said:

Jay,

I too saw the article. I had noooo interest in listening to the pain painstakingly, scientifically researched, well reasoned, computer modeled voice. I immediately thought of a Terry Gilliam cartoon also depicting painstaking research by thoughtful scientists.

 

[paraphrasing] Archeologists discovered this dinosaur part in an urban dig site.

Terry%20Gilliam01.png

 

With their collective expertise they were able to reconstruct the ancient beast in its entirety.

Terry%20Gilliam02.png

(credit: Terry Gilliam and PYTHON)

 

Scientists and their computer models make me laugh out loud.

 

 

Perhaps a reference of sorts to:

 

"

The Iguanodon models represent fossils from the Jurassic and Cretaceous of Europe. Gideon Mantell sketched the original fossil, found in Sussex in 1822 by his wife, Mary Ann Mantell, as like a long slender lizard climbing a branch (on four legs), balancing with a whiplike tail; lacking a skull, he conjectured that the thumb bone was a nose horn.[27] The nose horn in particular is used repeatedly in popular textbooks and documentaries about dinosaurs to make fun of Victorian inaccuracies;[28] actually, even in 1854, Owen commented "the horn [is] more than doubtful".[29]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs

Obviously the fossil record does provide evidence regarding the natural world of the past for which there is no equivalent when it comes to sound. I think this is 1 of the fascinating things about the ephemeral nature of sound. We really can only imagine the sounds of extinct languages, animals, places etc. There are written descriptions of the sound Krakatoa made when it went off but no recordings.

https://kottke.org/14/10/the-worlds-loudest-sound

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