First song performed using computer speech synthesis

In 1960, American computer scientists Carol Lochbaum and John Kelly programmed an IBM 704 mainframe to sing the vaudeville-era popular song "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)". The song was set to a synthesized backing track put together by electronic music researcher Max Mathews. The details of the software they wrote to perform the song – known as the Kelly-Lochbaum Vocal Tract – were published in an academic journal in 1962.

These experiments were spin-offs from broader research into speech synthesis that Kelly and Lochbaum (along with many others) had been carrying out at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA. Earlier speech synthesisers such as the vocoder and VODER (Both also developed at Bell Labs) were occasionally used to perform songs, but these machines were manually controlled using a foot-pedal and dual-keyboard arrangement that took months of practice to master. For several years afterwards, the singing mainframe was shown off as a party trick for visitors to the facility. In 1962, it sang "Daisy Bell" to science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who was visiting a friend who worked there. He remembered the computer's slightly eerie performance years later, when writing the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey and incorporated it into the "death" of the crazed artificial intelligence HAL-9000.