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HAL 9000's voice sounds unsettling because it's Canadian
April 10th, 2018
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I saw this post on BB earlier, I found it entertaining, so I'm posting
it here.

=> Full repost from BoingBoing.net | By Clive Thompson, originally published 4:27 AM, 9 April 2018 | License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

HAL's voice sounds unsettling because it's Canadian

Stanley Kubrick had a lot of trouble getting the right voice for HAL in
2001: A Space Odyssey. He initially used the Oscar-winning actor Martin
Balsam, but his Bronx accent wound up making HAL sound "a little bit
too colloquially American," as Kubrick later decided.

=> So Kubrick turned instead to Douglas Rain, a Canadian stage actor who

was a veteran of dozens of plays. It worked -- Kubrick got the weird,
calm, eerie affect that made HAL so unsettling.

=> Part of what made things work? Apparently it was Rain's Canadian

tonalities:

     Kubrick was attracted to Mr. Rain for the role partly because the
     actor “had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right
     for the part,” he said in the 1969 interview with Mr. Gelmis. But
     Mr. Rain’s accent isn’t mid-Atlantic at all; it’s Standard
     Canadian English.

     As the University of Toronto linguistics professor Jack Chambers
     explained: “You have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from
     nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place. Standard Canadian
     English sounds ‘normal’ — that’s why Canadians are well received
     in the United States as anchormen and reporters, because the
     vowels don’t give away the region they come from.”

As a Canadian myself, this tickles me to no end.

There are plenteous other trippy details in that piece, including the
fact that since HAL's performance was recorded after all the other
scenes were in the can, Kubrick got Stefanie Powers to read HAL's lines

=> during the shoots! And then this ...

     Anthony Hopkins has said it influenced his performance as the
     serial killer Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
     Douglas Rain himself has never seen “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For
     the retired actor who spent decades at the Stratford Festival and
     turns 90 in May, the performance was simply a job.
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