![]() ![]() It brings to an end the most affecting scene in the entire film. Sung as HAL’s brain is being disconnected, it’s from his early programming days, his computer childhood. Rain sing the 1892 love song “Daisy Bell” (“I’m half crazy, all for the love of you”) almost 50 times, in uneven tempos, in monotone, at different pitches and even just by humming it. And his delivery of the line “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do” has the sarcastic drip of a drawing-room melodrama and also carries the disinterested vibe of a polite sociopath. Rain somehow manages to sound both sincere and not reassuring. When HAL says, “I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal,” Mr. ![]() Though HAL has ice water in his digital veins, he exudes a dry wit and superciliousness that makes me wonder why someone would deliberately program a computer to talk this way. “Just try it closer and more depressed.” “Sound a little more like it’s a peculiar request.” Rain only a few notes of direction, including: Kubrick, according to the transcript of the session in his archive at the University of the Arts London, gave Mr. Kubrick sat “three feet away, explaining the scenes to me and reading all the parts.” Rain had to quickly fathom and flesh out HAL, recording all of his lines in 10 hours over two days. Standard Canadian English sounds ‘normal’ - that’s why Canadians are well received in the United States as anchormen and reporters, because the vowels don’t give away the region they come from.” Rain’s accent isn’t mid-Atlantic at all it’s Standard Canadian English.Īs the University of Toronto linguistics professor Jack Chambers explained: “You have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place. Rain for the role partly because the actor “had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right for the part,” he said in the 1969 interview with Mr. ![]() Rain remembers fondly: “If you could have been a ghost at the recording you would have thought it was a load of rubbish.” Kubrick finally decided against using narration, opting for the ambiguity that was enraging to some viewers, transcendent to others. Rain hadn’t even been hired to play HAL, but to provide narration. The cast members had long since completed their work, getting HAL’s lines fed to them by a range of people, including the actress Stefanie Powers. He met none of his co-stars, not even Keir Dullea, who played the astronaut David Bowman, HAL’s colleague turned nemesis. The actor hadn’t seen a frame of the film, then still deep in postproduction. It was determined during ‘2001’ planning that in the future the large majority of computer command and communication inputs would be via voice, rather than via typewriter.” The “2001” historian David Larson said that “Kubrick came up with the final HAL voice very late in the process. So how was this particular creature created? We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.” He said in a 1969 interview with the author and critic Joseph Gelmis that one of the things he was trying to convey was “the reality of a world populated - as ours soon will be - by machine entities that have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings. “When I listen to something like Siri I feel there is a lot in common.”Įven when Kubrick was making the film, the director sensed HAL’s larger implications. Brave said, adding that he saw a ripple effect on, for example, the iPhone’s virtual assistant. “He has a sense of deference and of detachment,” Mr. To Scott Brave, the co-author of “ Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship,” HAL 9000 is a mix between a butler and a psychoanalyst. incursions into all aspects of our lives, HAL has been lurking. As we warily eye a future utterly transformed by A.I. Just ask Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home - the cadence, the friendly formality, the pleasant intelligence and sense of calm control in their voices evoke Mr. Rain’s HAL has become the default reference, not just for the voice, but also for the humanesque qualities of what a sentient machine’s personality should be. ![]()
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