Here are the lyrics:
Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer, do!
I'm half crazy, All for the love of you!
It won't be a stylish marriage,
I can't afford a carriage,
But you'll look sweet on the seat
Of a bicycle built for two!
They are called tandem bikes nowadays, or so I’m told. Not very popular—whether for traveling or courtship—but still available for purchase.
Even back in the early 1960s, this tune didn’t have much hipness potential. But at least the melody was simple, well-known, and no longer protected by copyright. (That said, I would love to watch a jury in 1961 debate computer music rights.)
For the instrumental parts of the song, the Bell Labs team relied on contributions from Max Matthews, who had created a breakthrough sound-generating program called MUSIC back in 1957. In those ancient analog days, he had hooked up his violin to an IBM 704, and was thus the first performer in history to transfer live music to a computer for synthesis and playback.
The Bell Labs team now built on this foundation with its new speech synthesis technology. The task must have seemed frivolous to many back then—who could have envisioned the future dominance of digital music at the dawn of the 1960s?—but the team drew on the talents of serious high-level scientists.
Gerstman, for example, would later emerge as one of the first experts in analyzing ‘voice prints’ and served as expert witness in the celebrated 1973 criminal prosecution of New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison for bribery, where his analysis of a tape recording played a key part in securing an acquittal. Later he would turn his attention to helping people recover their speech skills after a stroke. But back in 1961 he was focused on the more lighthearted project of giving singing lessons to an IBM computer.
The entire performance of “Daisy Bell” lasted less than two minutes, with the vocal only featured for 30 seconds. It sounds creepy, but also surprisingly futuristic. Listening to the singing IBM of 1961, I can’t help but be reminded of current-day pop songs with a little bit too much Auto-Tune in the vocal. But for listeners back then, the closest equivalent might have been the corny megaphone fad of the 1920s, which found Rudy Vallée and others using this crude means of amplification on records and live performance. (Here’s another, more recent example.)
