Homer Dudley

What Dudley contributed

Homer Dudley's work at Bell Telephone Laboratories established a foundational analysis-synthesis approach to speech. The vocoder represented speech through a compact set of control signals, while the Voder allowed trained operators to manipulate pitch, excitation and resonant characteristics to create speech. The 1939 demonstrations proved that intelligible speech could be constructed from components rather than replayed from a recording.

Why it mattered

Removes the need to record a human performance for every utterance that must be heard.