[DECtalk] introducing myself / synth singing

[Jayson Smith]

Hello,

     The three files you mentioned have been moved to /Talksina in the 
DECtalk archive. This effects the www.bluegrasspals.com site, and not any 
mirrored copies, unless they have made similar changes. I'm thinking about 
ways to make the entire archive available to download at once, but want to 
wait for it to stabilize. Snoopi and Blake, have you finished all your 
uploads? I'm not asking that you hurry up if you haven't. I'm just saying 
that, if you haven't, there's no point in providing a torrent or suchlike, 
since it would quickly become outdated.
Jayson

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Talksina" <evvivajaws at libero.it>
To: <dectalk at bluegrasspals.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2008 6:52 AM
Subject: [DECtalk] introducing myself / synth singing


>
> Hello.
> I am an Italian blind girl, who loves to make synthesizers sing, I
> answered last week to a post about making the archive in .torrent
> file (I am interested about it)
> As I wouldn't like someone to think I am such a lurker or some
> stranger coming to ruin the list's atmosphere...I love to make
> synthesizers sing. DecTalk first of all, and also the Italian one,
> but unfortunately that one sings just my language, there's no way to
> make it sing in other languages, as in dectalk there is not ability
> to make it sing italian!
> well, to introduce myself in the audio way,
> I am the author of this:
> http://www.bluegrasspals.com/dectalk/Miscellaneous/blowing.mp3
> or this
> http://www.bluegrasspals.com/dectalk/Miscellaneous/crash_test_dummies.mp3
> or this
> http://www.bluegrasspals.com/dectalk/Miscellaneous/titanic_soundtrack_by_Jois_from_italy.mp3
> well, Jois (pronounced as Joys) was my old nickname. Very old, but
> now I am Talksina in every Internet community.
> It would be nice if those files could be placed in a directory called
> Talksina, on the archive, but, tell me if you need me to put the ID3
> tags and send them back, to make it easier I could put all my DecTalk
> productions on a zip file, then send it by itself or downloadable via
> link or torrent. But, as I am leaving for holiday  on Saturday,
> coming back the 1st of September, we'll talk about it in that date.
> Well. Making synthesizers sing, has always been my passion since
> 2000, and started playing with DecTalk.
> But unfortunately, I found no Italian-speaking singing synth. As
> English is not my mother language, the effort for me is double as I
> must, first of all hear the song's words, then, get the lyrics from
> Internet and of course the music in Midi or karaoke version. Then,
> try to find the right pronunciation with phonemes, sometimes I make
> horrible mistakes, as I am terribly influenced by my Italian accent,
> such as writing the word "windows" in phonetic alphabet instead of
> "wixndowz" I wrote "wiyndows". ARGH! So, if I get a non-English
> pronunciation with English voice,the sound is rediculous. So, the
> right way I found, is to make DecTalk read the word as it is, and
> find out the phonemes that match the correct pronunciation.
> That's why I am making it sing lesser and lesser, I need such an
> amount of time!
> In 2003 I discovered that my licensed Italian Loquendo robotic male
> and female voices could sing, I was just playing with a TTS, made a
> mistake and the 2 words just sounded with different music notes. It
> looked really as it was singing. And that was!
> So I started enjoying myself making songs and tests
> and, the best thing of this synth is that it doesn't need to convert
> the audio file into mp3 or wav to try if the sound is good, if there
> are mistakes, it can directly speak, it's sapi5 compliant and works
> with any TTS-driven software that support synth-specific commands.
> a sample (italian song) here, just to make you hear what I am talking 
> about.
> http://www.audiomontaggi.net/erfinestra/cremonini_demo.mp3
> The trouble of this synth is that unlike DecTalk, it has no specific
> adjustable parameters to make it sing, you adjust silence with
> punctuation marks and writing a letter as many  times as you wish the
> sound to be long. So, counting that a letter is about 200
> milliseconds, you must calculate how many milliseconds are needed to
> match whatever note in a music file, to syncronize voice and music.
> And if nothing fits, you must play with voice rate parameter
> OK... bye ciao.
>
> _______________________________________________
> DECtalk mailing list
> DECtalk at bluegrasspals.com
> http://jaybird.no-ip.info/mailman/listinfo/dectalk