The overwhelming winner of the choose-your-desired-voice-type poll was for a voice imitating that of the antagonistic computer HAL 9000 from the masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey by Kubrick.

This proved to be quite a specific task. Nobody exactly advertises themselves as being able to do HAL 9000 voices; it's not a commonly needed thing. So I had to off in search of a perfectly unaccented American, with no regional dialect, who could talk calmly, coolly, completely devoid and detached of all emotion.

I found Brett Balfour, and after exchanging some specific instructions on performance and a few plugin chains that I built myself out of vocoders + bitrate downsamplers (to introduce a little bit of that Mac DocTalker feel into it, a bit like it's being delivered by the old Radiohead "Fitter Happier" voice, but not entirely robotic), and holy cow. I think you backers have your HAL 9000 imitation voice. When I listen to this it is so hard to believe this was performed by a human, but it was. It fools ME on repeat listening and I mixed the darn thing! I wonder if it fools Brett.

The arpeggiator glitched and broke at the beginning of this render and I decided to leave it, so there are like 15 seconds of beeps at the opening. I left it, because what better place to leave in a malfunctioning computer than the HAL render?