Japanese lab creates 'Da Vinci' voices

TOKYO: Cracking 'The Da Vinci Code' could have been easier - well, maybe - if the characters had
enlisted the Japanese lab which has 'recreated' the voices of Leonardo and Mona Lisa.

Using methods employed in criminal investigations, the Japan Acoustic Lab says it has analyzed the skeletal structures of the historical figures' faces to replicate how their voices would have sounded.

 The voices are part of the intense promotion of the Hollywood film on Microsoft's Japanese site at
http://promotion.msn.co.jp/davinci/voice.htm.

"We believe we were able to create the voices that are very close to the real voices. Perhaps it was really how they really sounded," the lab's chief Matsumi Suzuki says on the website.

A former police engineer who specialises in audio analysis, Suzuki says he assumed the woman in the legendary
famed Leonardo painting was 168 centimeters tall, giving her a relatively low tone for a woman.

"We cannot tell exactly how tall she was. So we analysed the length of her right middle finger" and looked at the average height of Italian women, he said.

Suzuki says he gave Mona Lisa a slightly nasal tone because of her relatively large nose.  For Leonardo, Suzuki made his voice around the time when he was 60 years old to match his bearded face in the famous sketched portrait.

"Because the beard covers his jaws in his portrait, we could not tell his exact skeletal features. We assumed that he had a heavy-jowled face, giving him a nice, bass tone," Suzuki says.