By the time Kubrick was satisfied, they had recorded the song about 50 times. Rain sung it in different pitches, with an intentionally uneven tempo, in monotone, and eventually, he even just hummed it. Kubrick, famous for being a perfectionist and for frequently forcing his actors to do dozens and dozens of takes, made Douglas Rain sing 'Daisy Bell' over and over again in a variety of ways, so that he could get it just right. Clarke witnessed a demonstration of this computer's unusual talent during a visit to Bell Labs, and he was so captivated by it that he decided to incorporate the song into his novel. The singer was an IBM 7094 mainframe computer at Bell Laboratories.

The reason that it was chosen as the song HAL would sing was because, in our real world, it was the first song to ever be 'sung' by computerized speech. If you couldn't identify the tune though HAL's distorted wailing, it's called 'Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),' a song from all the way back in 1892. Such a machine could eventually become as incomprehensible as a human being, and could, of course, have a nervous breakdown - as HAL did in the film.' Most advanced computer theorists believe that once you have a computer which is more intelligent than man and capable of learning by experience, it's inevitable that it will develop an equivalent range of emotional reactions - fear, love, hate, envy, etc.

In an interview, Stanley Kubrick gave a quote which supports this reading, saying, 'In the specific case of HAL, he had an acute emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility. HAL then killed the crew in self-defense, or perhaps murder with aggravated circumstances, depending on your perspective. However, this one error led to Dave and Frank thinking that HAL was untrustworthy and needed to be disconnected. In this reading, this is the only true malfunction HAL has throughout the film. Regardless, Rain's voice was perfect for the eerily calm AI.Īnother, slightly more complex version of this idea was that HAL had a different, much smaller glitch when he reported to Dave that there was a problem with the ship's antenna. And in his case, that was Canada. Perhaps this common perception that Canadian accents are difficult to place for Americans is why they manage to get work so often as news anchors in the United States. Yet it turns out that Rain, like everyone, did come from a specific place. He was initially considering using Rain as the narrator for the 2001: A Space Odyssey, but once he decided to not include any narration in the film, Kubrick realized that Rain's eerily calm delivery and difficult to place ' bland mid-Atlantic accent' were exactly what he was looking for in a voice for HAL. In the end, Kubrick settled on Douglas Rain, who had previously narrated a 1960 documentary called Universe, which Kubrick apparently liked a great deal. To find a new HAL, Kubrick sent out set assistant Benn Reyes to find an actor with a voice that would be 'neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic or actorish.

Hal 9000 daisy bell