Which Is Possibly My Best Idea Yet!

You know what I think would be cool? If somebody programmed some really advanced voice synthesizer software that took into account all the physical factors influencing the sound of the human voice. And I mean all the factors: number/placement of teeth, dimensions of mouth/lips/tongue, diameter of throat, quality of vocal cords, lung capacity, abdominal force, size of nose, standard posture, sinus cavities, everything.

So once all the numbers were sufficiently crunched, then you could speak into this synthesizer, and it would process your voice and regurgitate it as that of a person whose physiology is different from yours in whatever ways you choose. Maybe not a specific person, exactly, but somebody with a smaller nose, and bigger tonsils, and some teeth missing, or whatever suits your fancy.

(Somebody could totally do this. I mean, it would take an awful lot of measuring, but computers these days are definitely up to processing the data.)

Okay, but then -- and here's the cool part -- you could also take the stats and adjust them to the anatomy of any animal you want.

You gotta know that, if your dog spoke to you, his voice wouldn't sound remotely human. Even if he were fluent in English, he would sound weirdly distorted, what with the long snout, all that extra tongue, and not much in the way of incisors. Or your cat: good at sibilants, yes, vowels no problem, but how would he manage those labial consonants? Aren't you curious about what that would sound like? Aren't you tired of waiting for him to learn?

And that's just the beginning. How would an elephant speak? A hamster? A crocodile? I really, really want to hear what it would sound like if a giraffe cracked a joke. Could a snake's whisper be intelligible? Would all birds have a similar inflection? Oh, it would take me a very long time to get tired of playing with a toy like this.

But aside from the quasi-scientific research, the "what if" factor (which, admittedly, is my favorite part), think of what this could do to the movie industry. The movies are full of talking animals, but do they sound like animals? No! I'm telling you, a real lion would not sound anything like Liam Neeson. Or Matthew Broderick. A giant wolf would not sound like Gillian Anderson, even after digital manipulation to make her growlier. And I bet a real piglet would sound waaa(eeeeee)y more annoying than Christine Cavanaugh's charming rendition. In this age of cinematic wonders, why are we still doing animal voices with Mr. Ed technology?

...We'll leave the teapots alone, though. Teapots can just go ahead and sound like Angela Lansbury.