HP Innovation Journal Issue 04: Fall 2016 | Page 19

software running on the HP chipset. This tech-
nology could be easily ear-tuned by Professor
Hawking to his own sonic tastes in real time.
The main challenge was reaching Hawking’s 100
decibel loudness level, portability requirements,
and wide voice dispersion angle (or “2π”) goals.
Dr. Charles Chin, Senior Audio Architect for
Sound Research, performed extensive power
supply and custom processor modifications to
the Roar+ system. Paul Kitano and Kristin Kosak,
Sound Research Audio Systems Engineers,
doubled Roar’s two speakers to four to achieve
Professor Hawking’s far-field loudness require-
ment and Dave Rittenhouse created a speaker in-
dustrial design to achieve Professor Hawking’s 2π
dispersion goals. Their efforts paid off; Professor
Hawking’s 2π voice speaker now measured 99.7
decibels at 0.5 meters with exceptional far-
field vocal clarity and 2π sound field dispersion.
Combining the HP Roar+ technologies with up-
dated industrial and acoustic designs from Intel
and Sound Research, Hawking’s 2π voice speak-
er was quite loud at a great distance and over a
wide sound stage. The speaker was now ready
for Professor Hawking’s ear-tuning.
Tom and Sue Stallcup, Administrator for
Sound Research, traveled to Cambridge, UK
to meet with Professor Hawking and his local
support team which included Jonathan Wood,
Teaching Assistant to Professor Hawking, and
Mark Green, Technical Marketing Engineer for
Intel Corporation. Two PC computers were con-
nected to Professor Hawking’s 2π voice speaker.
One computer adjusted the Sound Edge® and
smart amp optimization software to Professor
Hawking’s exact sonic taste. The other comput-
er adjusted the smart amplifier with custom HP
speaker drivers. Professor Hawking supervised
the ear tuning session by advising our team as
to his perception of the 2π voice speaker’s tonal
balance and overall loudness, although Hawking’s
Sound Research achieves Hawking voice loudness goal with
excellent clarity at 99.7dB
high frequency perception was challenged by an
ear infection during our tuning session.
Later on, when Professor Hawking recovered
from his ear infection, his aide requested that
Sound Research set up a second ear-tuning ses-
sion in Cambridge. Dr. Chin traveled from Taipei
City, Taiwan to Cambridge, UK to readjust the
tonal balance for the 2π voice speaker.
The next challenge
The tuned 2π voice speaker was installed onto
Professor Hawking’s wheelchair. Unfortunately,
an electrical hum from the wheelchair system
was amplified by the voice system. After Paddock
added a Jensen isolation transformer and Canare
Star-Quad audio cabling to decouple the noisy
audio system components, the hum complete-
ly disappeared from the voice speaker. Paddock
had previously designed similar circuits for the
Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir as
well as for Mickey Hart’s percussion instrument
known as “The Beam.”
A unique experience
In the summer of 2016, Ticky and Tom met
for the first time. As they swapped stories and
learned of each other’s efforts over the years to
help Professor Hawking, a bond formed. “Ticky
and I have had a unique set of experiences,” said
Paddock. Both men agreed that giving Professor
Stephen Hawking a clear, portable voice was one
of the most challenging and rewarding tasks they
had ever undertaken.
So what’s in the technology
future for Stephen Hawking?
Professor Hawking’s 2π voice speaker algorithm
running in legacy voice synthesizers since the
1980s was transferred to a pure software algo-
rithm running on an Intel processor within a PC.
This upgrade, along with the ultra-tunable and
portable Reality Amplifier system, designed by
Sound Research’s Dr. Chin, Paul Kitano and Kristin
Kosak, will eventually provide Professor Hawking
with his distinctive voice in a fully-portable sys-
tem that will allow him to communicate without
requiring his wheelchair.
Intel is now making Hawking’s voice
Stephen Hawking and Tom Paddock at University of
Cambridge during their first 2π voice speaker mastering
session
technology available to the public. This tech-
nology is called “Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit”
or ACAT.
Intel decided to make the source code freely
available so that anyone with a Windows PC and a
webcam for tracking facial movements can modi-
fy the code in an effort to help Professor Hawking
and others with similar disabilities. Ticky and Tom
have shared important contributions toward the
evolution of ACAT technology from the early days
of “walled garden”, one-off hardware solutions
of the 1980s to the PC-enabled, Windows-based
programmable solutions of the 1990’s and ear-
ly 2000’s, and finally to today’s “open source”
development environments — making possible
rapid, differentiated, and powerful solutions to
address disabilities in the future.
“Our hope is that, by open sourcing this con-
figurable platform, developers will continue to
expand on this system by adding new user inter-
faces, new sensing modalities, word prediction,
and many other features” said Sai Prasad, Intel’s
Program Manager for ACAT. 

Ticky Thakkar is Head of the Emerging
Compute Lab, Chief Technologist of
Personal Systems, and an HP Fellow,
leading efforts relating to the conver-
gence of technologies and bringing
customer insights and new thinking into
product development efforts.
Tom Paddock is CEO at Sound Research ®
Corporation, and has 40 years of expe-
rience in audio product architecture and
audio software design. He has designed
hundreds of audio products .See more
at www.soundresearch.com.
Issue 4 · Fall 2016 · Innovation Journal 19