---
created_at: '2017-12-08T17:10:59.000Z'
title: Bicycle Built for 2,000 (2009)
url: http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/info.html
author: cribbles
points: 101
story_text: 
comment_text: 
num_comments: 19
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1512753059
_tags:
- story
- author_cribbles
- story_15880159
objectID: '15880159'

---
[Source](http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/info.html "Permalink to ")

![][1]

Description

Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.   
  
[ < Back to project page][2]

Why this song?

The song "[Daisy Bell][3]," originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, was  
made famous in 1962 by John Kelly, Max Mathews, and Carol Lockbaum as the first example of musical speech synthesis. In contrast to the 1962 version, Bicycle Built For 2,000 was synthesized with a distributed system of human voices from all over the world. 

Did people know what they were submitting to?

Workers were asked to imitate what they heard. They were not given additional information. 

Isn't that the song that HAL is singing at the end of _2001: A Space Odyssey_?

Yes. 

How much were people paid to record their voice?

$0.06 USD 

Where are these people from?

People from 71 countries participated. The top ten were the United States, India, Canada, United Kingdom, Macedonia, Philippines, Germany, Romania, Italy, and Pakistan. 

How did people record and submit their voice?

In a web browser, through a custom audio recording tool created in [Processing][4]. 

Credits

[Aaron Koblin][5]   
[Daniel Massey][6]

[1]: http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/website_header.png
[2]: http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Bell
[4]: http://www.processing.org
[5]: http://www.aaronkoblin.com
[6]: http://www.daniel-massey.com/

