Ulalume
tart of darkness
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2009
- Messages
- 3,340
- Location
- Not Texas
A couple of the contributors mention the fact that the stations first appeared in great numbers in the very early 1970s and added that the number groups are read out in 'synthesised voices'; one chap stating quite plainly, 'it's a computerised / synthesised / whatever female voice". Now, listening to the recordings of those old stations, many no longer broadcasting, it occurs to me that they don't sound like anything of the sort. I can't claim any knowledge of the state of digital voice synthesis in the 1970s, but remember how ropey it was in the eighties and nineties. The spoken numbers sound to me like individual recordings that have been somehow sequenced in the desired order.
This is probably neither here nor there given Ermintrude's excellent reply, but one of the eerier things (IMO) about some of those old number station voices was how natural they sounded until just toward the end of a word, when the voice would take on a slightly metallic tone. What sounded like a human voice suddenly became....not.
I saw (or heard, or read) somewhere that a former numbers station reader had been located, but she hadn't had any real idea for what purpose she'd been reading the numbers. IIRC, she didn't question it, it was just part of her job.