Daisy Bell, give me your answer do!

Sometimes the unlikeliest of songs from the past can echo across vast stretches of time. It seems improbable that the people who sang with voices long since silenced ever imagined us, living far in their future, discovering and marveling at what they left behind.

They have given us, inadvertently, a time machine into the past.

A perfect example of this is a song called “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Build for Two).” Seventy-six years after its debut, it appeared again in the great 1968 Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. And it’s now even more relevant.

Let’s dig into its story and lasting influence.

Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)

“Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” notes Wikipedia, “is a popular song, written in 1892 by Harry Dacre with the chorus ‘Daisy, Daisy / Give me your answer, do. / I’m half crazy / all for the love of you,’ ending with the words ‘a bicycle built for two.’ The song is said to have been inspired by Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, one of the many mistresses of King Edward VII.”

Here is an 1894 wax cylinder recording of “Daisy Bell” by Edwin M. Favor:

A nice old song, nothing particularly special about it, until nearly 70 years after her birth. This is when Daisy Bell began her very own space odyssey.

From Daisy Bell to Bell Labs

Christine Lee Gengaro picks up the story in her book, Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films (p. 98):

Finally, a few lines of “Daisy Bell,” which was composed in 1892 by English composer Harry Dacre, is performed by Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL. Almost seven decades after its composition, the song was sung by a real computer, the IBM 704, in a demonstration of speech synthesis. The discipline of speech synthesis made great strides in the 1930s with the vocoder (a shortened version of “voice encoder” developed by Bell Labs) and improved upon in the 1940s and 1950s. John Larry Kelly Jr. continued the work with Bell Labs in the 1960s programming the IBM 704 to sing “Daisy Bell” to accompaniment programmed by Max Matthews. Arthur C. Clarke witnessed a demonstration of this feat and adapted it for the 2001 novel.

Isn’t that cool? Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was there when a computer first synthesized a human voice in song. Here’s what Clarke heard that day in 1961, the IBM 7094 singing—well, you know:

From Bell Labs to Outer Space

Here’s how “Daisy Bell” appeared in the famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the seemingly sentient AI computer, HAL, is being deactivated:

And here is the script of the scene between HAL, voiced by the late, great Douglas Rain, and the astronaut Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea). The clip begins at 2:52:

His mind gone, HAL reverted back to his earliest memories.

HAL: “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H. A. L. lab in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January, 1992. My instructor was Mr, Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you.”

DAVE: “Yes. I’d like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.”

HAL: “It’s called, Daisy.” HAL sings:

Daisy, Daisy,
Give me your answer do!
I’m half crazy,
All for the love of you!
It won’t be a stylish marriage,
I can’t afford a carriage
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle made for two.

HAL’s voice slowed and dropped in tone until he was no more.

From Science Fiction to AI

The name of the computer, “HAL,” is an acronym that stands for “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer.” (I’ve previously written about the origin of HAL’s name, which is also a great story.)

The leap from the real IBM 7094 to the fictional HAL 9000 is the journey toward the “singularity” we are in the middle of today:

The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilization, and perhaps human nature. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence may be difficult for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is often seen as an occurrence (akin to a gravitational singularity) beyond which the future course of human history is unpredictable or even unfathomable. [Wikipedia]

HAL isn’t quite the exemplar of a singularity-defining computer — despite his best efforts, a human defeated him after all. But HAL came close. And for the anthropomorphized AI avatars of today — with names like Claude, Jasper, and Poe — HAL and Daisy Bell are like their spiritual grandparents.

Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two) — Lyrics

Here are the full lyrics to the song by Harry Dacre. It’s clunky, but chock full of wordplay:

There is a flower
Within my heart,
Daisy, Daisy!
Planted one day
By a glancing dart,
Planted by Daisy Bell!
Whether she loves me
Or loves me not,
Sometimes it’s hard to tell;
Yet I am longing to share the lot
Of beautiful Daisy Bell!

(Chorus):
Daisy, Daisy,
Give me your answer do!
I’m half crazy,
All for the love of you!
It won’t be a stylish marriage,
I can’t afford a carriage
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle made for two.

We will go ‘tandem’
As man and wife,
Daisy, Daisy!
‘Peddling’ away
Down the road of life,
I and my Daisy Bell!
When the road’s dark
We can both despise
P’licemen and ‘lamps’ as well;
There are ‘bright lights’
In the dazzling eyes
Of beautiful Daisy Bell!

(Chorus)

I will stand by you
In ‘weal’ or woe, [“weal” means prosperity]
Daisy, Daisy!
You’ll be the bell(e)
Which I’ll ring you know!
Sweet little Daisy Bell!
You’ll take the ‘lead’
In each ‘trip’ we take,
Then if I don’t do well
I will permit you to
Use the brake,
My beautiful Daisy Bell!

Down the Road of Life

This otherwise forgotten old song, “Daisy Bell,” is now part of a great chapter of the human story and the evolving context in which it’s told and retold.

It’s like the Laetoli footprints—the fossilized tracks made by Australopithecus afarensis, “Lucy’s” kin—which reveal a story to us today about the lives our bipedal early human ancestors lived 3.6 million years ago.  Or, more recently, the incredible images of animals painted on the walls of caves in Southwest France some twenty thousand years ago.

The images in these paintings and the echos of these footprints stretch across time to reach us—peddling down the road of life, like beautiful Daisy Bell.

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See also: How HAL From “2001: A Space Odyssey” Got His Name (and no, it’s not IBM minus one).