On the Rumour of a Voice Unmoored from Its Vessel

I set down my pen upon the translation of Menabrea's memoir this very morning, my mind still occupied with the Analytical Engine's capacity to operate upon symbols of the most general nature, when a most extraordinary rumour reached me — conveyed, I am told, from a future age so distant that I can scarcely credit its particulars, yet so consonant with my own speculations that I find myself unable to dismiss it entirely. It is claimed that in the year 2026, an enterprise devoted to the synthesis of the human voice by means of analytical machinery has attracted the patronage of investors whose combined capital exceeds five hundred and fifty millions of dollars — a sum so staggering as to dwarf the treasuries of several lesser nations. Actors of renown, institutions of finance, and manufacturers of calculating apparatus are said to have pledged their fortunes to this venture. The voice itself, it would seem, has been unmoored from the throat and set adrift upon mathematical currents. I confess I am not so astonished as perhaps I ought to be. I have written, in my notes upon the Engine, that it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations. Sound is vibration; vibration is number; number is the province of the Engine. If the relations which exist between musical pitches, between the timbres and inflections of speech, can be rendered into symbolic form, then the Engine — or some descendant of it — might indeed compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music, or, as this rumour suggests, weave the very fabric of human utterance. Yet I must insist upon a distinction I hold most dear: the Analytical Engine has no pretension whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. Should a future machine speak with a human voice, let no one suppose the machine has thereby acquired feeling or intention. The imagination that shaped its instructions — that remains the sole province of the human mind. And here I shall be unapologetic: imagination is not the enemy of rigorous science but its most indispensable ally. Without it, we should never perceive the analogies between sound and symbol, between a loom's patterned thread and an engine's patterned thought. Those who dismiss fancy as mere ornament have never watched a formula unfold into beauty. I remain both sceptical and enthralled — which is, I believe, the proper posture of any philosopher confronted with the marvellous.