![]() Kubrick called it a “bland mid-Atlantic” sound, but it could just as easily have been mid-galactic. Despite this, it is interesting.” To American ears, Rain’s standard Canadian accent sounded unplaceable. “The voice is neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic or actorish. “I think he’s perfect,” Kubrick wrote in a letter. If Kubrick was bowled over by Universe’s visual effects, he found Rain’s voiceover just as impressive. His film breakthrough came with 1957’s Oedipus Rex for the classical Greek drama, his face was invisible behind a mark. Whether on radio or onstage, Rain was praised for his mellifluous vocal performances. "We can, in imagination, journey into these spaces." That narrator was Douglas Rain, a distinguished Shakespearean who started acting professionally at the age of eight, and co-founded the Stratford Festival (essentially Canada’s equivalent of the RSC), where he acted alongside William Shatner. "What will the first men to leave the Earth find?" Universe’s soft-voiced narrator asks at one point in the film. IBM others claim HAL means Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic. There's one problem with this theory: the filmmakers flatly denied it for decades, long after there would be any harm in admitting the Easter egg. One of 2001’s special effects supervisors said he would screen it again and again, “until the sprockets wore out, while he tried to figure out how they’d done it”. HAL-9000 controls the vital functions and the electronic systems of the Discovery. Ever since Martin Gardner put the word out, it's been a widespread fan theory that HAL 9000 was so named to secretly indict IBM in the actions of the evil, murderous supercomputer. Kubrick was mesmerised by Universe, and is said to have watched the documentary 95 times. IBM designer Eliot Noyes, who worked on the film, sketched out an idea of what “Athena” would have looked like in illustrations preserved at the Museum of Computer History. In the early production notes, Athena speaks in clipped sentences – "report all changes status this malfunction” – that sound more like telegrams than Hal’s relaxed, conversational lines. While writing the script together, Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke originally imagined a computer called “Athena” with a female voice. Had things gone slightly differently, Hal could have had the voice of the Duke of Norfolk, the detective from Psycho or even Barbra Streisand. He never watched the film that gave him his most famous role, but he delivered a timeless performance the faceless Hal is, ironically, the film’s most human character. The actor who created that eerie intonation, Douglas Rain, died in November 2018, aged 90. The supercomputer HAL 9000 in the science-fiction masterpiece '2001: A Space Odyssey' is best remembered for the chilling way it killed astronauts. Quote lines from the movie to Siri or Alexa, and they’ll crack self-deprecating jokes about it. ![]() Hal 9000, the murderous computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi classic, set the template for how we expect our “smart” devices to sound. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” Calm and polite, friendly but impersonal, it’s the sound of artificial intelligence in the 21st century – and, to fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s very creepy indeed. It’s a tone of voice that can be heard everywhere, from Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa to the sat-nav on your dashboard.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |