The Brazen Head: A Talking Oracle from 1594

How to keep watch

Light the candle first. Until then the vault is dark and silent, and the click on the candle is also what allows the page to make sound. The head speaks with the voice of S.A.M., a speech program from 1982, pushed through three resonators that open and close with its jaw. Everything it says is written on a scroll as well, so you can play with the sound off.

Then write a question on the strip of parchment and feed it to the head, or keep watch without one. The hourglass is turned. Before the sand has run out, the eyes light up and the head says Time is. From that moment you have three and a half seconds to ring the bell: click it, or press the space bar or Enter. Ring in time and Friar Bacon wakes, and the head answers your question.

The vault does its best to make you ring too early. The jaw clicks, the friar talks in his sleep, the candle nearly goes out. Ring for nothing and Bacon wakes up for nothing, and he lets you know. Miss the moment and the head falls silent; the next time it says Time was and you have two seconds. The third time it says Time is past, you get one second, and after that the play takes its course.

A broken head stays broken, also when you come back tomorrow, until you cast a new one: work the bellows three times. Every new head carries a seam where the last one broke. Ask the same question within the same hour and you get the same answer. The button at the top right of the vault, or the F key, makes it fill the screen.

Four heads of brass and the books they come from

For five hundred years Europe told the same story about learned men and talking heads. The page is built on the last and best known of them, but the head knows all four.

Gerbert of Aurillac William of Malmesbury, around 1125

Gerbert, the scholar who became Pope Sylvester II in 999, is said to have cast the head of a statue that spoke only when spoken to, and then only yes or no. Asked whether he would be pope, it said yes. Asked whether he would die before he had sung mass in Jerusalem, it said no. He never went to the Holy Land. But in Rome there is a church called Jerusalem where the pope sings mass on three Sundays of the year, and on one of those days Gerbert fell ill as he prepared for mass, and died.

Robert Grosseteste John Gower, 1390

In Confessio Amantis the bishop of Lincoln spends seven years forging a head of brass that will tell of things to come, and loses all of it because he is half a minute late. Gower tells it as a warning to lovers who hesitate.

Albertus Magnus William Godwin, 1834

Albertus is said to have built a whole man of brass, over thirty years, that answered every question and served him as a domestic, until it talked so much that his pupil Thomas Aquinas picked up a hammer and beat it to pieces. Leave an awake head alone long enough and you will understand him.

Roger Bacon Robert Greene, printed 1594

The version most people know is Greene's play Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay, written around 1589. Bacon has made a head of brass that is to tell him how to put a wall of brass around England. After sixty days of watching he falls asleep and leaves his servant Miles on guard with a bill in his hand. The head says Time is. Miles decides that is not worth waking anybody for.

What the head says 189 quotations, each checked against its source

The head never invents anything. Every answer is a quotation in the spelling of the book it comes from, with the source written under it on the scroll. Questions that start with will, shall, is, can and the like get a yes or a no, the way Gerbert's head answered, sometimes with a proverb as a sting in the tail. A few questions it recognises. Everything else is drawn by lot from these books:

• Robert Greene, The Honorable Historie of frier Bacon, and frier Bongay (London, 1594), with four lines from the edition of 1630. The head's own words, and those of Bacon and Miles.
• Nostradamus, The True Prophecies or Prognostications of Michael Nostradamus, translated by Theophilus de Garencières (London, 1672). For most questions.
• The Prophesie of Mother Shipton (London, 1641). When nobody asks anything.
• John Heywood, A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the englishe tongue (London, 1546). The sting after a yes or a no, and the chatter of a head left alone.
• Meric Casaubon, A True & Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits (London, 1659), and Dee's private diary, edited by J. O. Halliwell (1842). What the angels told John Dee and Edward Kelley.
• Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), in Brinsley Nicholson's reprint of 1886. After midnight.
• William of Malmesbury, Chronicle of the Kings of England (around 1125, translated by John Sharpe and J. A. Giles, 1847), John Gower, Confessio Amantis (1390, edited by G. C. Macaulay, 1901), and William Godwin, Lives of the Necromancers (1834). The head's own history.

The texts of 1546 to 1659 come from the transcriptions of the Text Creation Partnership (Early English Books Online), the rest from Project Gutenberg. Long s is printed as s; everything else, u for v and all, is as it was printed.

From brass heads to the vocoder

People have tried to make metal talk for as long as they have told stories about it. In 1791 Wolfgang von Kempelen published a book about the speaking machine he had built from a bellows, a reed and a leather mouth. In the late 1930s Homer Dudley at Bell Labs built the vocoder, which splits a voice into bands and lays them over another sound. In 1981 Kraftwerk released Computer World, full of voices that are half machine, and in 1982 a program called S.A.M. let home computers speak.

Electro never let go of that sound, and neither did I. My Nord Micro Modular has one job in my studio: it is my vocoder. So once you have woken the friar, a drawer slides out of the pedestal and the head becomes an instrument. Type a line, hold a key or a chord, and the head sings it. S.A.M. speaks the words, twenty filters measure the speech band by band, and the same twenty bands are cut from one of three carriers: a raw sawtooth (I, S.A.M. Vintage), a minor triad of detuned voices on every key (II, Monks Choral) or a low electro bass (III, Sub-Brass). The jaw moves with what you play.

The upper manual can be tuned a quarter tone above the lower one, as on the two-manual quarter-tone pianos of the 1920s. On a computer keyboard the keys are laid out as in a tracker: Z S X D C V G B H N J M for the lower manual, Q 2 W 3 E R 5 T 6 Y 7 U for the upper. On a phone, turn on Hold keys to build a chord one finger at a time.

Record a take and save it as a WAV: 24-bit, 44.1 kHz, with or without the vault around it, and nothing spoken at the end. The file is called Brazen_Head_Vocoder_1594_LloydStellar.wav and you can use it in your own tracks. If you want to hear where this kind of sound ends up, my records are on Bandcamp, free to stream.

Credits and the rest of the cabinet

Built by Lloyd Stellar, electro producer and software developer from Hilversum. The vault, the head and the friar are not photographs or bought models: they are shapes described in code, drawn by your graphics card and engraved line by line by a shader, so the candle can move their shadows. The voice is S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth, Don't Ask Software, 1982) in Christian Schiffler's JavaScript port SamJs. Type: IM Fell English by Igino Marini and EB Garamond, both under the SIL Open Font License.

More in Lloyd's Wunderkammer: Lloyd's Scriptorium, where any answer of the head can be written out in Theban, Enochian or Elvish, and The Book Nobody Can Read, an investigation of the Voynich manuscript. For the sound of all this: my music is on Bandcamp and Spotify.

Finis