A FATHER with motor neurone disease has turned to pioneering technology to preserve his voice for his young son.

Laurence Brewer, from Bolton, is using the voice software Model Talker to “bank” 1,600 phrases and sentences to enable him to continue to read to his 13- month-old son, Stan.

Mr Brewer, aged 43, said his son inspired him to become the first known person with MND in the UK to successfully catalogue his voice so he could always know what his father sounded like.

Mr Brewer, who works at Salford University, said: “I wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t for Stan. I wouldn’t have that motivation.

Knowing that he’s around, passing that on, it’s a key driver for me.

“If my voice goes within the next six months he might not recognise me, recognise my voice particularly. And in five years time, if I have the voice banked, then he can hear what I sounded like or an idea of what I would have sounded like. So it’s a memory.”

He added: “I like the idea the technology’s not very advanced, it’s not wordperfect and I imagine the final outcome will be a bit like a Lancastrian Dalek which makes me smile a lot.

“I quite like that idea, that Stan will hear that and it’ll be part of me and part of my cultural identity.”

His partner, Danijela, came across the software while researching MND on the internet.

She said: “Laurence used to play and sing in a band, so his voice is important to him and I cannot imagine not having his voice around. I would certainly like Stan to know the timbre of Laurence’s voice in some form.”

His tireless quest to complete the recordings was shown on BBC One’s Inside Out North West yesterday.