[DECtalk] Dennis Klatt

Flint Million fmillion at gmail.com
Sat Mar 29 14:22:07 EDT 2008


Hey, Changed the subject so we're on a new thread. Wow, that's
interesting, never knew that's why Dennis wrote that in. The only
other synth I know of that can sing is MacinTalk on the Macintosh. As
is there were some pre-programmed tunes that were set up as voices in
the voice list. VocalWriter is a tool that harnessed this ability and
offered MIDI-based precise control over the speech synth to allow it
to sing. I've done a lot of work with it at
http://speech.themillionweb.net if you're interested. As for PC-based
and hardware synths, I don't think any other synth has ever had
inherently-coded singing abilities - most other synths have been made
to sing simply by setting to monotone and messing with the pitch and
rate until it kind of sounds decent. DEC-talk still beats them all for
hardware synths. Correct me if I'm wrong bc I'd love to mess with any
other synth designed to sing, but far as I know DEC-talk is the only
hardware-based solution thta can do it!

Flint M

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:54 AM, Corine Bickley
<corine.bickley at gallaudet.edu> wrote:
> just a random question from a dectalk engineer - is it still the case that
> only dectalk can be programmed (note by note) to sing? i was a student of
> Dennis Klatt and he would be so pleased to know that people still enjoy
> using his singing features for dectalk. you all probably know that dennis
> first incorporated singing controls into dectalk so he could have his
> synthesizer sing Happy Birthday to his daugher Laura, right?
> corine bickley



More information about the Dectalk mailing list