Inflection: The Voder, Voderettes, and Voice

In the summer of 1939, at the New York World's Fair, a woman sat beneath a three-story mural of a shouting man and shaped raw electricity into a human voice. In this episode: Homer Dudley: the engineer who reimagined the human voice as a handful of numbers at Bell Telephone Laboratories The Voder: The human-driven machine built to imitate the effects of the human vocal tract The Voderettes: 24 telephone operators chosen from hundreds who practiced for more than a year to play the Voder  Helen Harper: The Voder virtuoso who trained the other Voderettes to perform feats of mental gymnastics to make the machine speak. Episode Music Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0Building Nests in the Ruins Kadupul The Other Side Oceans Apart Background SoundsWR Sound Library. City Center Crowd Sound - No Copyright | Infinite. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/people-city-center-crowd-sound-no-copyright-infinite-wr-sound-library-553084/ Astronaut Flute. The Marching Band. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/music/marching-band-the-marching-band-536193/ Archival Audio MonoThyratron. (2011, July 9). The Voder - Homer Dudley (Bell Labs) 1939 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyI_dM5cGo Additional Reading Schindler, G. E., Jr. (Ed.). (1982). A history of engineering and science in the Bell System: Vol. 3. Switching technology (1925-1975). Bell Telephone Laboratories. https://archive.org/details/historyofenginee0000unse_q0d8 Simon, S. M. B. (2025). Operation Voder: AT&T, Bell Labs, and the labor of techno-utopia at the 1939 New York World's Fair. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 47(2), 20-31. https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2025.3528717 Story B. H. (2014). Structure, Movement, Sound, and Perception. Perspectives on speech science and orofacial disorders, 24, 7–20. https://doi.org/10.1044/ssod24.1.7 Synthetic Sound Labs. (2017, December 14). Voder synthesis. https://steamsynth.com/history/voder/ Raphael, L. J., Borden, G. J., & Harris, K. S. (2007). Speech science primer: Physiology, acoustics, and perception of speech (5th ed.). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. https://books.google.com/books/about/Speech_Science_Primer.html?id=AKaiz3TiIJ8C  Support the show 💚 This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon. Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.