Nate was placed in front of a microphone. He, Sally, and, the technician put on headphones too. The woman spoke to them. “My co-worker is going to give you a sheet of things to say. Just read them into the microphone using your normal voice.”
Nate read the script. “This is a vial of the Estra-Zappica vaccine that was smuggled out of a mass clinic so it could be tested. Here is it under 200 power magnification. As you can see, there seem to be metallic structures. What are they doing in a vaccine? And look at this video footage I took over a long period of time and sped up, the structures seem to be replicating and assembling into larger structures. Is that a tentacle? Or is it an antenna? It looks like nano-tech. But that can’t be, humanity doesn’t have anything like this sort of science-fiction stuff. So where does it come from? Could it be from an alien civilization? Why is the government so adamant that everyone get injected with this stuff for a disease that doesn’t seem to be much more dangerous than the flu?”
The woman at the mixing board spoke again. “That’s good. I have your sound levels set up. Could you repeat it?” Nate did as he was told. At that point, the bearded man asked indicated it was OK to remove the headphones.
“If you’ve ever wondered why so much popular music sounds exactly the same nowadays, there’s a good technical reason. Modern musicians are often terrible performers so they rely on technology to correct the fact that they don’t know how to sing in tune and can’t project their voices. Everyone knows that amplifiers overcome poor projection, but they were also used to hide the fact that many professionals can’t even play a tune. Blast the sound loud enough and all the subtleties get lost. Now we have something called an “auto-tuner” that will actually change the pitch of a singer and fix the problems in a singers voice. There are also other technologies that can change timing, and other subtle features of pop music. Unfortunately, the result is a decline in musicianship and everything ending sounding much the same.”
“What we’ve been working on here is to analyze the speech patterns of charismatic influencers on the loony fringe to find out what ‘works’ and what doesn’t. We’ve come up with a machine and a program that we think is able to mimic their abilities. We call it ‘audio ketchup’, because we slather it over ‘bad tasting’ ideas so gullible people will eat them up.”
“It consists of a mixing system plus a couple software programs. The first one is an auto-tuner that maximizes the sort of tones that the best influencers use. Here’s what your brief statement sounds like auto-tuned.”
Nate could clearly recognize himself, but there was a deeper resonance---and a distinct sound of ‘confidence’ in the recording.
The woman typed some more on her keyboard. “Now I’m going to run a special program that we developed here. It uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence to recreate the same rhythm as the best influencers. It speeds up voice, adds dramatic pauses, etc.”
Again, it was still Nate speaking---but even more authoritatively than in the previous play back.
She spoke again while her fingers clattered on the keyboard. “Now we are adding in modulations in the volume. This creates different emphasis for different ideas. Again, done with an AI using software created here.”
This was the strongest version of all. Nate was amazed! He sounded like a Biblical prophet!
At this point Sally looked at her watch and announced. “OK. That’s enough for today. We have an appointment somewhere else. Thanks and keep up with the good work.”
She led Nate who followed back out the front of the old bakery and into the Jaguar.
&&&&
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