Speech Synthesis (draft)

Update: I happened to publish this when I was intending to save a draft. I’ll trim it down a bit nd keep it here, write a more interesting text another time. No undo, no surrender!

I think the first song I heard a computer sing in was Cylob’s ‘Rewind the Track’ (1998). That was pretty cool. Well, as it turns out, Max Mathews made this 26 years earlier. What the…? In fact, it is easier to make a computer sing than talk. “Talkboxes” were around before computers, but were pretty hard to handle, because of all the tonality of human talk. Voder!

We can distinguish two main types of making machines talk: constructed (consisting of short sampled phonems) and synthesized (the sounds are generated by software). Here’s a little list of low-fi sounding speech.

1962: bicycle for two @ v/a: Music For Mathematics
1963: misc bell stuff @ v/a: first philadelphia computer music festival
1963: misc bell stuff @ some 7″ release?
1980: Stratovox (arcade game, using SN76477) first?
1983: Star Wars (Atari arcade game, using TMS5220-chip)
1983: Discs of Tron (Atari arcade game, using TMS5220-chip)
1985: Indiana Jones (Atari arcade game, using TMS5220-chip)
1985: VironCybernet’s homemade
1990s: Dr.Sbaitso
2010: NES-singing using the (external) FDS-channel here + utube

Demoscene Speech Synthesises

• CSDb-thread about C64-stuff
• JCH – Orcus (C64-song 1990)
• Kolor – Void 3 (DOS 4k 1999). link
• Agemixer – Freestyler (C64-song 2002)

• Viznut – Who Cares (C64-demo 2004) sampled phonems, ie – run on 6581!
• Dalezy – Error23 (C64-song 2005)

• Jammer – hvsc (C64-song)
• Jammer – Mr Marvellous (C64-song 2006)
• Viznut – Progress Without Progress (C64-demo 2006)
• Jammer – Hot Mommas (C64-song 2007)
• Loonies – Planet Loonies (Amiga 4k intro 2006). youtube. source/info.
• Viznut – Robotic Liberation (Vic20-demo)
• Viznut – Robotic Warrior
• Wamma – (core) (Atari 2600 demo) utub

Tools

• the Apple speaks, by Bob Bishop (software or tutorial?) here (1979)
• Commodore Speech Demo (c64 1984)
• MacInTalk (Mac 1984)
• SAM (c64)
• Atari 520ST Speech Synthesizer (here)
• Say in AmigaOS (1985)
• Speech Demo 4, among others (c64 1985)
• Speech Demo Kennedy Approach (c64)
• Audiosculpture (Amiga/Atari 1999x)
• Dalek Speech, GUI for SAM (c64, 1994)
• LSDj (Gameboy 200x)
• RADWAR Speech Synth (c64, 2007)
• C64 SPO256 Speech Emulation (c64, 2008)

Misc

• Speech Plus Inc for misc PCs (1984) youtube
• Synthetiseur Vocal for C64. French and rather articulate. info + mp3
• Currah Microspeech (SP0256)

Vocoderoidz

• Alih – Chase That Feeling (C64-demo 2009). Two channels of singing – the vocoder-approach. info
• Frantic – Birdburner (C64-thing 2010). Replaying bird speech with triangle voice on/off. Yes, birds talk too, you specieist.