[DECtalk] Singing Computers

Alex H. linuxx64.bashsh at gmail.com
Sun May 12 12:11:54 EDT 2013


The Wayback Machine won't help you, at least, not for actual binaries
from what I've found.

Vocalwriter isn't accessible really from what I've heard, so that's
annoying. DEC is probably the most simplest to get going, and the only
one I really have seasoned experience with. Perhaps others on this
list can assist you better.  :)

All the best,
Alex

On 5/12/13, Alfredo's Desktop computer <birdlover2002 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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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