[DECtalk] Singing Computers

[Blake Roberts]

Festival sings well. Years ago, I found a webpage where individuals used
Festival to sing songs. Although the MP3 download links there no longer
work, I saved one of the Festival songs on my computer when the download
links worked.
Blake
-----Original Message-----
From: dectalk-bounces at bluegrasspals.com
[mailto:dectalk-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] On Behalf Of Allhp
Sent: Sunday, June 02, 2013 3:01 PM
To: DECtalk Discussions
Subject: Re: [DECtalk] Singing Computers

Hello!

By the way, there is a speech synthesizer called Festival. It works
primarily on Linux, but You can try to build-up it under Windows. I don't
know exactly how to do it, but I know that it's doable. A year ago or so I
saw discussion somewhere on the Internet how to do this. Unfortunately, I
cannot remember where it was. Some, not all, however, Festival voices can
sing. I didn't research this topic, so cannot give You anything practical to
have it up and running.

-----Исходное сообщение-----
From: Alfredo's Desktop computer
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 10:29 AM
To: dectalk at bluegrasspals.com
Subject: [DECtalk] Singing Computers

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I found this post on Klango, but note that a lot of the links are out of
date: http://klango.net/en/forum/thread/tid/12217/page/1.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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