Physicist Stephen Hawkins' Voice Sampled On The New Pink Floyd Album

This sounds like the perfect bridge between art and science, the two most important activities of the human spirit… aren’t they both ultra specific to our unique species? Or we tend to believe…

Pink Floyd’s upcoming and very anticipated album ‘The Endless River’ will feature the voice of famous theoretical-physicist Stephen Hawking, or rather his robotic artificial voice! Hawkins, who suffers from ALS is almost entirely paralyzed and communicated through a speech-generating device, and his strange voice will appear on ‘Talkin’ Hawkin’, one of the tracks of the album.

However it is not the first time it happens, Pink Floyd had previously sampled the physicist’s voice on their 1994 ‘The Division Bell’ single: ‘Keep Talking’… At that time the physicist’s voice was sampled from a commercial.

‘I don’t think he even wrote the words that they used with him, but…he was in it, in his wheelchair,” said guitarist David Gilmour in a radio interview in 1994. ‘He looks kind of strange. And I just found it so moving that I felt that I had to try and do something with it, or with him or something, in some way.’ On that song, Hawkins was saying, ‘For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination.’ And I don’t know about you but I am just seeing that scene from Kubrick’s ‘2001 Space Odyssey’ while tapping this..

However the new song does not appear to be a sequel of the 1994 one. The Endless River will be released on November 7th, and will include 12 tracks written by the late Richard Wright, during sessions recorded in 1993. This is also the album which Roger Waters doesn’t want to have anything to do with: ‘I have nothing to do with Endless River. Phew! This is not rocket science people, get a grip,’ wrote Waters on his Facebook page… actually we now know that the album has more than ever everything to do with rocket science precisely.