[IAEP] Reading (was Re: changes in outlook with Sugar

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> Hi Jim,
>
> On 4 Jul 2009, at 17:09, Jim Simmons wrote:
>
>> Edward,
>>
>> I think you have an interesting idea here.  It reminded me of the
>> scene in _2001 A Space Odyssey_ where Hal 9000 is having the higher
>> functions of his brain disconnected and he tries to sing "Daisy" while
>> he still has enough connected to do it.  From my experience working
>> with espeak I'd say that getting a computer to sing, even badly, may
>> be beyond what we can reasonably do today.

It has been done. Google 「computer sing」 . But that doesn't matter for
the purpose of Same-Language Subtitling of videos of people singing,
or a karaoke program with text synched to MP3s.

>> Espeak can speak at
>> different pitches and rates, but I don't think you can change pitch
>> and rate while speech is going on and if you could that's still a long
>> way off from actual singing.
>
> Not convinced it would make a viable solution for Sugar but...
>
> There's a speech synth called Festival (actually developed by Edinburgh
> University, my old Uni). It does support a singing mode, but others have
> extended it more completely. Here's some MIDI generated samples from flinger
> (festival singer):
>
>        http://speech.bme.ogi.edu/cgi-bin/flinger/show_jukebox.pl?all

http://www.chuckcaplan.com/blog/archives/2007/09/make_your_compu.html
September 07, 2007
Make Your Computer Sing With Festival

> A few yeas back a colleague of mine was involved in a gallery art
> installation that used (I think) 4 Mac minis mounted on a wall, and a small
> back room server to parse incoming junk mail. The Mac minis then sang out
> some of that text content realtime :-)
>
> Regards,
> --Gary



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