Bicycle Built for Two Thousand

A work of complete genius (using Amazon's Mechanical Turk) by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey using Processing - bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com

Description

Bicycle Built For Two Thousand is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.

Why this song?

The song "Daisy Bell," originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, was made famous in 1962 by John Kelly, Max Mathews, and Carol Lockbaum as the first example of musical speech synthesis. In contrast to the 1962 version, Bicycle Built For Two Thousand was synthesized with a distributed system of human voices from all over the world.

Did people know what they were submitting to?

Workers were asked to imitate what they heard. They were not given additional information.

Isn't that the song that HAL is singing at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Yes.

How much were people paid to record their voice?

$0.06 USD

Where are these people from?

People from 71 countries participated. The top ten were the United States, India, Canada, United Kingdom, Macedonia, Philippines, Germany, Romania, Italy, and Pakistan.

How did people record and submit their voice?

In a web browser, through a custom audio recording tool created in Processing.

Credits

Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey ©2009