It took eight weeks to bring to life the 2,590 words John F Kennedy never got to speak.
Sound engineers pulled 116,777 sound units from 831 of his speeches and radio addresses. These units were then split in half and analysed for pitch and energy. The half units, known as phones, were each about 0.04 seconds long and had to be tested next to each other to ensure that they did not clash. The W sound in weapons, for example, is not the same as the W sound in words.
“There are only 40/45 phones in English so once you’ve got that set you can generate any word in the English language. The problem is that it would not sound natural because one sound