[DECtalk] Singing Computers

Alfredo's Desktop computer birdlover2002 at hotmail.com
Sun May 12 02:29:20 EDT 2013


Hello,
My name is Alfredo Castaneda-Garcia, a singing computer and artistic 
music enthusiast. I research a variety of STEM-related fields and I 
wanted to ask a few questions about VocalWriter, as I have a Mac running 
OS X     Mountain Lion.
I would like to begin with the renditions of the songs you put up. A few 
I could not identify, such as Catch, Limbo, Obx, and The Open Gifts. I 
have been trying to search for lyrics or who wrote the song so I could 
learn more about them. Did you compose those pieces yourself?
I found this post on Klango, but note that a lot of the links are out of 
date: http://klango.net/en/forum/thread/tid/12217/page/1. I was 
wondering if you knew any places where I can broaden my resources to 
actually play with speech synthesisers? You see, I have been using 
DECtalk for over six years and have become tired of it. I am eager to 
try new speech synthesisers and explore different textures. I wanted to 
try MBROLA, but I am not sure if that system will be stable to run on 
new platforms. I want to experiment with Delay Lama, but I cannot 
produce consonants with it. It is supposed to simulate the vocal chamber 
using MIDI.
I would like to see a way to manipulate the string you play on a violin 
with a chamber where you can modify several harmonics at once to make it 
sound as the thing is talking. It might help us understand how the vocal 
folds work under all kinds of conditions, you know how it is when you 
expose your instrument to humidity, to excessive heat, extreme cold, and 
when you rupture a string. Then we can learn how to heal vocal folds, 
which might result in the complete changing of the voice in any 
creature. This is about conducting research on vocal tone and noise 
manipulation to create many kinds of vocal and instrumental sounds and 
then use it in a wide variety of applications. This is in a similar case 
to how Neil Harbisson experimented with colours, except he uses pure 
sine wave tones rather than tones with varying timbres.
I was going to see about using Vocal Writer on my Mac, but it runs on an 
Intel 5 processor, so it does not support it. And I do not know how to 
make the thing accessible. If visually-impaired people can use it, why 
can blind people not do the same? I have gone to thinking how I could 
apply sensory substitution devices to send the visual information into a 
host, such as what is already being worked on. You see, I have become 
fascinated with vision since I discovered I have the ability to 
associate light frequencies with drones, hums, noise and the like. I 
could associate them with the mathematical value or to an emotional key 
or interval sequence of some sort, not just major or minor.
I would like to learn how to make Microsoft's speech synthesisers sing, 
though I heard one needs Whistler to do that and I cannot find any 
places on Google. Perhaps the Bell voices, and Dolphin voices might be 
worth playing with. I found a way to make Eloquence almost sing using 
the back quote and V commands.
If you can think of any more that would be great. So many of these links 
are outdated and I was fortunate to find very few that still worked. I 
could use the Wayback machine but...
Anyhow, if you can address these that would be excellent.
Thanks,
Alfredo Castaneda-Garcia



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