Giulio Modena

Giulio Modena (Pontelongo, 1940) is an Italian engineer.

Biography After graduating from the University of Padua with a thesis on voice formant extraction, he was hired in 1967 by CSELT in Turin as head of the Electroacoustics section, where he conducted research on electroacoustic measurements, electroacoustic transducers, and speech signal processing.

In 1975, while at CSELT, he led the development of MUSA, the first stand-alone speech synthesizer capable of reading text and speaking in intelligible Italian: a second version, released in 1978, was capable of singing, including polyphonic ("a cappella") singing. Consequently, in 1978, the center became the only industrial entity in the world—with the sole exception of AT&T—to possess speech synthesis technology of industrial significance.

From 1979 onwards, he headed the User Terminals Division.

Publications