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	HAL 9000's voice sounds unsettling because it's Canadian
	April 10th, 2018
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	I saw this post on BB earlier, I found it entertaining, so I'm posting
	it here.

	Full repost from BoingBoing.net
	By Clive Thompson, originally published 4:27 AM, 9 April 2018
	License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

	HAL's voice sounds unsettling because it's Canadian

	Stanley Kubrick had a lot of trouble getting the right voice for HAL in
	2001: A Space Odyssey. He initially used the Oscar-winning actor Martin
	Balsam, but his Bronx accent wound up making HAL sound "a little bit
	too colloquially American," as Kubrick later decided.

	So Kubrick turned instead to Douglas Rain, a Canadian stage actor who
	was a veteran of dozens of plays. It worked -- Kubrick got the weird,
	calm, eerie affect that made HAL so unsettling.

	Part of what made things work? Apparently it was Rain's Canadian
	tonalities:

	Kubrick was attracted to Mr. Rain for the role partly because the
	actor “had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right
	for the part,” he said in the 1969 interview with Mr. Gelmis. But
	Mr. Rain’s accent isn’t mid-Atlantic at all; it’s Standard
	Canadian English.

	As the University of Toronto linguistics professor Jack Chambers
	explained: “You have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from
	nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place. Standard Canadian
	English sounds ‘normal’ — that’s why Canadians are well received
	in the United States as anchormen and reporters, because the
	vowels don’t give away the region they come from.”

	As a Canadian myself, this tickles me to no end.

	There are plenteous other trippy details in that piece, including the
	fact that since HAL's performance was recorded after all the other
	scenes were in the can, Kubrick got Stefanie Powers to read HAL's lines
	during the shoots! And then this ...

	Anthony Hopkins has said it influenced his performance as the
	serial killer Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
	Douglas Rain himself has never seen “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For
	the retired actor who spent decades at the Stratford Festival and
	turns 90 in May, the performance was simply a job.
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