And the night was alive with a thousand voices

[sovay]

I was not planning on posting anything for the sinking of the Titanic, but this came courtesy of derspatchel: the Titanic in her own words.

"This is Titanic. CQD."

There's the Carpathia, the Californian, the Caronia, the Baltic. Those are not actors reading the Morse transmissions that flashed back and forth across the wireless of the North Atlantic, jaunty, terse, desperate, encouraging, steadfast, frustrated, lost. Those voices are the product of speech synthesis software, only as capable of dramatization as the clicks and beeps of the telegraph key—ghosts speaking, but the ghosts in the machine, not the sea or our minds. Everything resides in the words. The words are devastating.

CQD. SOS. SOS. SOS. CQD.

Comments

[sovay]

It's just . . . the calm effect of it, and yet you know what's going on behind the words, and that makes it all the more devastating.

I really don't think they could have done the same with human actors. Just in this particular instance of technology, it's the closest we can get to the dead speaking for themselves.

(Though I do want to punch whoever threw that ad in right at the moment when Titanic falls silent. "All's Well That Ends Well -- in Gujarati!" SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.)

That was not the best-timed advertisement, no.