**Links to**: [[Meta-language]], [[Language models]], [[Modulations]], [[Language is music]], [[Pronoun]], [[Metalearning]], [[Neologistics]], [[Dialove]], [[Dialogics]], [[E Pointing]], [[Reference]], [[Self-reference]], [[03 Semantic noise]]. ### [[Question]]: How do we know what a robot should sound like? And why does a robot sound monotonic? This question takes the “robot voice” that we most commonly know from early synthesized voices (originating with IBM’s VODER, 1939, and later vocoder tech). Possible answers to this question reveal how important _language as music_ is to us, though we tend to forget that. Many AV sci-fi robots do not have the “robot voice”, and in most sci-fi this implies the fiction intends to grant them a certain anthropic quality.