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

[Gary C Martin]

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.  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

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