Richard Stilgoe heralds improved speech synthesisers

Composer and musical entertainer, Richard Stilgoe, OBE, is better known for writing the words to Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals than championing the need for improved speech synthesisers.

Richard Stilgoe's lecture, 'Another Orpheus sings again', takes place at 17.30 on Tuesday 29 February in the Great Hall, Sherfield Building

Yet giving disabled people the voices they want forms the main part of his talk at the 2000 Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture at Imperial College on Tuesday 29 February.

In 'Another Orpheus sings again', Richard will highlight the work of the Orpheus Centre, the residential performing arts centre where disabled and non-disabled young people create and perform pieces of music theatre.

He will also discuss working with communicators - computers that speak - and how these communicators might be improved. Joining him on stage will be Centre apprentices, Shelley Makin and James Todd who both speak using communicators.

With the experience his team has gained and the expertise of the high-tech speech designers, actors, music samplers and existing speech synthesisers could be brought together to develop the voices that disabled people want.

"These advances would help many people, not just those who are born with no speech of their own," he said. "Motor neurone disease sufferers gradually lose their voices; how good it would be if we could sample those voices in the early stages of the disease, and give them back to them electronically as the natural voice faded."

For complimentary tickets please email cherry@ic.ac.uk or telephone 020 7594 6261.