Voice-cloning technology bringing a key Supreme Court moment to 'life'

abcnews.go.com:

The use of a voice-cloning technology marrying old audio clips to an actor's narration is bringing an historic U.S. Supreme Court decision to life

NEW YORK — Seventy years ago on Friday, no one outside of the U.S. Supreme Court building heard it when Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision on school desegregation.

Now, through the use of an innovative voice-cloning technology, it is becoming possible for people to “hear” Warren read the decision as he did on May 17, 1954, along with oral arguments by lawyers including a future Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall.

The “Brown Revisited” recreation is being made available at brown.oyez.org. It will be part of a website, painstakingly put together by former Northwestern University professor Jerry Goldman, that allows people to hear oral arguments in decades worth of Supreme Court cases and follow along with written transcriptions. Yet it always frustrated Goldman that the court did not begin recording oral arguments until 1955 — a year after the Brown decision was handed down. Print transcripts just aren't the same.

“I could give you the libretto to ‘Madame Butterfly,’" he said. “But would you rather read it, or would you rather sit and listen to the performance?”

The Brown decision was a landmark in the civil rights movement. The court struck down an 1896 decision that institutionalized racial segregation with “separate but equal” schools for Black and white students, ruling that such accommodations were anything but equal.

While the court began recording arguments in 1955, virtually no one heard them until 1969, when they were made available through the National Archives for scholarly and legal research. Full public