If you've spent any time on TikTok lately, you might have heard a haunting little ditty crackling through your feed: a ...

“Nevertheless, the original Daisy Bell as relayed via an IBM computer – this meeting of music and machine –remains a bold and singular achievement, a profound leap into a brave new world ...

How you feel about IBM 7094's fuzzy rendering of "Daisy Bell" will depend on your tolerance for voice synthesis. It either tickles the brain in all the right places or deeply confounds it.

In 1961, the IBM 7094 was programmed to sing "Daisy Bell" -- the earliest demonstration of computer speech synthesis. The song "Daisy Bell" was sung again by HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey". The first ...