Well, my recent comments about programming my own speech synthesizer were, amazingly, not that far from the mark. I found some source code to the old (or one version of the old) DECTalk speech synthesizer, a first generation speech synthesizer from the 1980s. This variant bled into the the first Apple and Amiga speech synths, and a version of it was famously used by Steven Hawking.
It was the first time some source code that I found online compiled without a hitch! The resulting program had too much documentation, most of which was conflicting and contradictory, but I spent an hour last night and two hours this morning working out how to make it sing. The notes are basically 'bent' toward the destination, so songs consist of short stabs between vowels, then longer held vowels. The result is as pretty as the old Bell Labs one, and certainly better than Say-It (that has a morose and sad charm, but the quality is poor, gratey, and has an awkward 'parpy' tone like the singer in The Beautiful South).
I've spent all day reprogramming my song, phoneme-by-phoneme and note by note, into DECTalk format, then saving and editing the words and sounds from wav files. It's been exacting and exhausting work. If I'd done this in 1985 I'd be a brilliant artistic pioneer, and I'd have an avant-garde hit on my hands. Now, the music sounds a little like all music does now - but not quite! This song was written for this voice, it is sang from a computer's perspective, so it's perfect here, and songs in this 'retro' voice (the only good sounding voice) are rare. On balance, I might prefer the Say-It version for it's out-of-tune sadness, but the tone of that is very poor, badly aliased and difficult or impossible to decipher. I will see how time treats both versions.
In other news, I've renewed my membership to the surrealism.co.uk website. I don't particularly feel like a surrealist, if I ever did. As I've often said, I used the term only because it gives people an idea of 'what my art is like' but, perhaps that's what the term means now anyway.
Now I'm exhausted, having been awake since 4:30am, and working since before 7. What do I have to show for it? A song that was 95% complete a few weeks ago, but ah, the last 5% is the most important. DECTalk will come in handy in future too.
