On November 22 1963, John F. Kennedy travelled to Dallas, Texas, to make The Dallas Trade Mart speech. He never delivered it. He was shot dead before he could.
In the lead up to the end of the centenary of JFK’s birth, The Times has commissioned creative agency, Rothco, to celebrate his legacy by allowing him to give that speech.
JFK Unsilenced uses specialist AI technology to recreate the speech the 35th US president was meant to make in Dallas on the day he was assassinated.
Richard Oakley, editor of The Ireland edition of The Times commented, “The Times believes in bringing new perspectives to the news. Even if that news is a new perspective on something people thought they knew everything there was to know about it.”
Alan Kelly, executive creative director at Rothco, added, “When we delved into the words JFK had written for the Trade Mart speech, we found they were not only poignant for the time but strikingly relevant today. By bringing his voice back to life to deliver this speech, the message is even more powerful: ‘We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense’.”
JFL’s unspoken speech touches on topics such as freedom, power, wisdom and restraint: “We in this country, in this generation, are – by destiny rather than choice – the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of ‘peace on earth, good will toward men’.”
John F Kennedy gives his final speech
⚡️ “John F Kennedy gives his final speech” by @thetimeshttps://t.co/mE0YsruYly
— The Times of London (@thetimes) March 15, 2018
In order to put the president’s voice into the 22-minutes of words he had prepared to deliver, Rothco and tech company, Cereproc, built the monologue entirely out of data, using AI. It is a world first for the speech to be recreated in the president’s own voice and it was meticulously pieced together by analysing analogue recordings. The audio was then finessed at post production company, Screen Scene.
The intricate process involved:
- Isolating 41 phonemes for American English (the sounds that can be used to make any word) and stitching the small units of speech back together.
- Reviewing 831 analogue recordings of JFK speeches and interviews.
- Analysing speeches for noise, crosstalk and underlying sample rate.
- Applying audio processing to remove noise.
- Applying spectrum analysis tools to improve acoustic environment and match them across samples.
- Sounds were then carefully analysed for pitch, energy, and spectral features.
- AI techniques such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) were applied to learn a model of JFK’s audio, and how he uses intonation in his speech
- At synthesis time, DNN models and high-dimensional search were used to find the best set of units to create new speech audio.
- Finally, the speech was enhanced by months of painstaking sound engineering
“As part of Accenture Interactive, we really believe that now is the time for creative ideas to become world class brand experiences. We all crave great experiences, so brands like The Times that embrace this consumer want, will reap the rewards,” stated Patrick Hickey, chief executive officer, Rothco.
JFK Unsilenced launched on March 16 2018, as a 22-minute video on thetimes.co.uk, supported by cut-downs, teasers and promotional material on social, radio, digital, and print.
Here is the link to the article.
Find out more about the project here.
Credits:
Client: The Times
Client: Richard Oakley & Lynne Fraser
Agency: ROTHCO
Agency Producer: Al Byrnes
Executive Creative Director: Alan Kelly
Creative Team: Alan Kelly & Ste Rogers
Designer: Shane O’Riordan
Director of Marketing: Jill Byrne
Chief Executive Officer: Patrick Hickey
Operations Director: Sally Oldfield
Strategy: Paul Hughes & Kathy Troy
Production Company: Cereproc
Producer: Jenna Plant
Post House: Piranha Bar
Sound: Will Farrell @ Screen Scene
