Alien speech generator

It occurred to me today that it would be an interesting programming challenge to generate alien speech. I mean the kind of speech you hear spoken by extraterrestrials in science fiction films.

You wouldn’t need to generate actual functioning speech, just the feeling of it. In other words, when an ET opens up its mouth (or functionally equivalent bodily organ) to speak, what comes out conveys to the audience not only the sense of intelligent speech, but also some sort of coherent culture.

This effect was created very well, of course, for Klingon. But in that case, an actual language was designed. I’m suggesting something much less than that, but in a way also more. Our program could simply generate faux speech, as was done for The Sims. But it would need to be plausible and self-consistent faux speech.

For example, we may have an alien race with particular characteristics. Say, tall and thin, argumentative yet pacifist, aerially winged, living in a low gravity planet with a thin atmosphere, etc. We should be able to dial those characteristics into our speech generation software.

Then the software can proceed to generate plausible speech for such a creature. I am envisioning a process somewhat akin to generation of procedural texture — something we now see in movies all the time.

The alien speech generator should handle prosody, an impression of vocabulary, a kind of sound that suggests a particular biological equivalent to throat, breath and vocal cords, and generally something that maps recognizably into nuanced emotion.

If nothing else, this sounds like a really fun programming project.