2001: Why Kubrick used “Daisy” for HAL’s death
This is from a doc of 1963 with Arthur C Clarke about a wired world and artificial intelligence. Here’s the full computer speech demo from 1963: www.vintagecomputermusic.com this was done by Bell Labs, RIP. to read more: www.bell-labs.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Older computer technology blended with new technology! Dan Sindel performs Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two) reading from Barber shop Quartet sheet music using the AXON Guitar-to-MIDI converter running into a Pro Tools Digital Audio Workstation and factored in the original 1963 Bell Lab synthetic speech recordings of DAISY. With only a few adjustments to the timing of the original Bell Lab recordings to go along with the guitar music the file is in perfect integrity. **Download the full computer speech demo from 1963: tinyurl.com This video features old stock footage from Coney Island (1940′s) and some cool old ARMY footage of an Atomic Bomb Test – “Operation Cue”. Henry Dacre wrote Daisy Bell somewhere around 1892. One of the more famous moments in Bell Labs’ synthetic speech research was the sample created by John L. Kelly in 1962, using an IBM 704 computer. Kelly’s vocoder synthesizer recreated the song “Bicycle Built for Two,” with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Arthur C. Clarke, then visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility, saw this remarkable demonstration and later used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where the HAL9000 computer sings this song as he is disassembled by astronaut Dave Bowman. www.bell-labs.com
35 Responses 
Leave a Reply 
Live Longer
Free Subscription
Fountain of Youth
And that took 5 hours to render and about 7 years to make possible, and now MS Sam does the job in about 1 sec lol
@JakeANowhereMan Yeah, it really fits in, doesn’t it
The song actually makes sense to the present situation. HAL was programmed to lie to the crew, but he was also programmed to be always right and in turn honest. So he grew “half crazy” for the “love” of the crew. And the “marriage” in the song refers to HAL’s relationship with the crew which was plagued by the said doublethink.
im going to see this as my ring tone
the comuter singing is actually scary imo. it may be my undisscovered fear. computer being able to sing!
when that berzillian mumbo cut in, I got enraged, I was enjoying the song
@starwarsjohn13 It was MURDER,
poor HAL pleading for his life!
@juankubr “I sing you” is bad grammar.
Death After I Sing You “Daisy” is OK
or Death After I Serenade You
according to kubrick, that’s just a coincidence
Kubrick did a great job with music!
I cant listen to gene kelly’s singing in the rain without thinking of ultraviolence!
Ya, but do you think that Kubrick would do that by accident? Kubrick is much smarter than that. It could mean a lot more. It could be signifying Hal’s death to the point where he is getting the name wrong, it could be a back up memory in which somebody had put the name in wrong, the song could be so old by 2001 that they don’t even know the original name, or it could be a mess up. But Kubrick was a genius and a perfectionist either way.
The memory blocks that slide out are direct subconscious references to the shape and size and vertical position of the monolith.
@persianlor Huh, I’ll be darned. It IS called “Daisy Bell”, somebody gave me bad intel. But there’s no “probably” about it. “Daisy” is not what it’s called, either. And more than just the author of this video, HAL in the film says it’s simply “Daisy”, so it’s on Kubrick too.
Actually “avatarmn”, the real name for the song IS NOT “Bycle Built For Two”.
The real name for the song is “Daisy Bell”…so the author of this video is probably not all that wrong.
The song is not called “Daisy”. It’s called “Bicycle Built For Two”.
The only thing this film did not include was the proverbial moth found by Grace Hopper. Kubrick was a frakkin genius.
t-pain in the 50′s
i can listen to this all day
yeah, how the hell does that link from this?
…that freaked me out.
cool, but it is also hardware abstraction layer…
An strategy used in portable kernels in order to hide obscure architecture details from high level portable code
Please apologize any grammar mistakes commited by me in any of the both languages used in the last comment…
Cause it can be really hard to shift my brain between two different languages with completely different logics quickly…
“Nos estaremos em contato instanteneo com o mundo, mas o que lhe diremos?”
What does it have to do with the first speech synthesizer?
It sounds more like predictions about communication satellites in the late 60s…
@CrowServo3000 and IBM tried suing Kubrick for that reason… but failed… miserably.
What the hell?! The weird Breastfeeding video again!? It’s haunting me!
I’m scared…
@Seuration yeah yeah yeah everyone a critic! thanks though
would help if your playing and the computer’s singing were in the same key.
other than that, nicely done.
yes the HAL voice does lend a very creep element does it not… The music definitely has a dark carnival vibe to it.
Now you know.
by the way , this video really terrified me …
No interesting… I always heard that HAL was a logical shift in the letters of the alphabet
H=I
A=B
L=M
you didn’t see the novel , did you ?
author said that HAL is not IBM
HAL is “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer”
LOL hey Thank you for the comment…. yes the footage is a bit weird and disturbing in a “jovial” sort of way is it not?
No hidden meaning really I was just having some fun chopping up some stock footage and that is where I parked it.
This is so horrific and yet jovial at the same time. I love it.
HAL = IBM