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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.

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  • panoptican 2 years ago
    so whatchyr saying is that 2,088 people, averaged out, roughly = 1 robot. right?

    i'm mostly kidding. awesome concept and execution. this should be the first in a long running series.
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  • Randy Jones 2 years ago
    Impressive idea and well-designed execution. I'll take this over Autotune any day.
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  • Benjamin Lotan 2 years ago
    wow, i like this a lot. lots of potential for other similar projects. reminds me of the white glove video project...
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  • willc2 2 years ago
    So the Uncanny Valley applies to human voices as well as faces. Eeesh.
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  • Mac Rutan plus 2 years ago
    Nice work! Keep it up. Bell labs or IBM need to give you a grant to keep going!
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  • Neil 2 years ago
    The end result sounds demonic. I'm afraid of that song now.
  • David Leith 2 years ago
    exactly what came to mind when i heard it. lmao.
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  • Adriana de Barros 2 years ago
    I'm definitely featuring this soon at Scene360.com and illusion.scene360.com. I had already favorited it last week. I have a number of videos in line, one per day.

    Stay tuned, it will be up soon.
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  • alex tyson plus 2 years ago
    I dig.
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  • Zack McTee pro 2 years ago
    is the whole song up somewhere in audio format? This is great!
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  • Dominika Wolski 2 years ago
    creepy... a chorus of 13 small children would have sounded better?

    Or is it a big spectacle of how we ALLOW and embrace the distortion of our naturally inherent human song by machinery?

    (how very philosphical).. STILL sounds creepy!!

    well executed!
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  • Janet 2 years ago
    Pretty cool !! Not that smart yet. I might grow up one day. lol
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  • Joe Dunkley 2 years ago
    wow that sounds so evil, love it
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  • Ben plus 2 years ago
    Sweet mother of God. But in your clip - it sounds like people are imitating a sound originally made by a computer - in tone as much as substance. I wonder what the effect would be if they were imitating a human voice, with instruction to sing normally.
  • Justen Renyer 2 years ago
    I was wondering the same thing. Perhaps singing to a visual 'click track', but singing the song all the way through. I guess the difference I'm thinking of is additive vs. averaged.
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  • Adam Good 2 years ago
    Amazing use of Mechanical Turk!
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  • Jon Adams plus 2 years ago
    Very interesting.
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  • Stewy Michaels 2 years ago
    Nice video, very educational!
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  • Rehanna 2 years ago
    the song sounds sooo scary, but its cool how you put it together. nicee :)
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  • Robert van Hoesel 2 years ago
    Great. Love it. Next time use a human computer voice.
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  • brett stormoen 2 years ago
    thats rad.



    but creepy.
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  • Michael Carney Media plus 2 years ago
    pretty cool
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  • RuzzT 2 years ago
    Awesome!!
    ...and terrifying!
    I pray that robots never try to take over the world, because I'm pretty sure they would sing this song while they calmly walk through our neighborhoods vaporizing us with lasers.
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  • Obscura 2 years ago
    So that's what it's like to have multiple personality disorder. Thanks!
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  • William Justo54 2 years ago
    great video, it's very educational indeed :)
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  • Enri Bimbashi 2 years ago
    i don't get it
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  • Heather St. Clare 2 years ago
    very creative. this must have taken forever.
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  • Ilmari Aho 2 years ago
    Great work! The result is as scary as HAL 9000...
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  • David 2 years ago
    I'm sure that Kubrick would have heard that and used that for HAL's meltdown sequence in 2001.

    Remember HAL is one letter backwards from IBM.
  • Arlo Barnes 6 days ago
    But Arthur C. Clarke set that rumour straight in 2010, the sequel to the 2001 book (2010 was also made into a movie), saying (through one of his characters) that HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithm[ic], and the letter shift was a coincidence.
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  • Ryan Shaffer 2 years ago
    Yikes on the singing. I'd have given the task to at least amateur singers, but I suppose the wide distribution of pitches around each note makes for a more interesting result.

    The implications of projects like this one are incredibly fascinating and humbling. Makes me think of evolution from molecules into organelles, organelles into cells, cells into multicellular organisms, and multicellular organisms into meta-organisms (especially humans into a world-wide meta-brain connected through the internet)...oh, and don't forget the most important evolutionary step: the assimilation of meta-organisms (societies) into the Borg Collective.

    I would have had a message put up on the computer screen during the submittal process that said, "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."
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  • Valentios 1 year ago
    Super!
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  • Uploaded Wed March 11, 2009
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