A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates - Audio Edition

This is an audio version of the acclaimed book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. Although it was originally published in 1955, there has never been an audio version of it -- until today. Weighing in at 18 gigabytes of audio data, the book provides 455 hours (almost 19 days) of listening enjoyment.

The print edition contains a series of random numbers and some guidance on how to use them. At the time it was published, generating random numbers was challenging so the book was fairly useful and noteworthy for mathematicians, scientists, etc. RAND used it for lots of things, probably including gaming out how a global nuclear war would work out.

The audio book is simply a reading of the digits, in order, along with the introduction, preface, etc. It was generated via a bunch of Python scripts that use the Azure Speech service to generate the samples for all of the digits. Originally I considered generating samples for the numbers zero through nine, and just combining them together. But that generated pretty monotonous audio, so instead I generated samples for every unique sequence of five digits. I spread the creation out over a few months to maximize my use of the Azure free tier (although I messed up and did end up with a bit of a bill).

I originally thought that I would use the code that generates audio for the secret broadcast to generate the audio book, but ultimately I ended up writing some very simple Python code to do the work. I had a script to generate the samples, and a few more to combine them together into WAV files. I had to split the audiobook into sizes small enough to not exceed the 4GB maximum WAV file size.