The Mona Lisa finds her voice

According to CNN, an acoustics expert named Dr. Matsumi Suzuki is capable of recreating the sound of a person's voice based only on their physical proportions. Suzuki has looked at the Mona Lisa to demonstrate what the voice of painting's subject would have sounded like.

Dr Matsumi Suzuki, who generally uses his skills to help with criminal investigations, measured the face and hands of Leonardo da Vinci's famous 16th century portrait to estimate her height at 168 centimeters (5 feet, 6 inches) and create a model of her skull.

"Once we have that, we can create a voice very similar to that of the person concerned," Suzuki told Reuters in an interview at his Tokyo office last week.

"We have recreated the voices of a lot of famous people that were very close to the real thing and have been used in film dubbing."

If foreign dub tracks are the standard for voice accuracy this method lives up to, judging from my DVD collection, the voice probably sounds nothing like the actual Mona Lisa.

Most frustrating of all is what the Mona Lisa has to say. After 500 years of silence, when she finally gets a chance to speak, all she can do is toot her own horn:

"I am the Mona Lisa. My true identity is shrouded in mystery," the portrait proclaims on a Web site.

Mona, please. Already, you're a yapping fool.