Julia Child’s 100th Birthday & Engineering

I’m old enough to recognize that Child’s singing voice on this video sounds much like Julia Child did on those 1970’s era TV shows she hosted.  How did they make Julia Child sing for this this sweet (pun intended!) video?  My guess is that they used a product like Antares Auto-Tune to alter the original sound track of some video clips from her TV shows.  Consider the variety of the technologies needed (other than cooking!) to televise and record those original TV shows, to convert them to a digital format, to artfully edit them into the remix, to make her talking voice into a singing voice, to add a synthesized backup band, and to wing this over the web to your eyes and ears.  If that intrigues you, then you might be interested in engineering!  All of these technical tasks fall squarely into the arena of electrical and computer engineering.

My doctoral research was in signal processing.  Thus it was a delight for me to discover this “remix” tribute, not only because I once enjoyed her TV shows when they were originally broadcast, and not only because I love food (Bring on the roasted potatoes!), but also because I enjoy the type of engineering work that made this retrospective “remix” possible, even if Auto-Tune is not my particular project.  I just thought I’d bring that to your attention!

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Image: from the linked You Tube Clip