DIY + Unusual Music tech Tech
Enjoy Monty Python’s Argument Sketch on two vintage speech synthesizers
A DECtalk Express stands in for Monty Python actor Michael Palin, with an Intex Talker (Votrax SC-01A) voicing the role of John Cleese. Retro speech synthesis just sounds better. Not more intelligible, necessarily, but absolutely better. And it’s hilarious. Eat your heart out, Transmediale / Ars Electronica / etc.: If all of this sounds familiar, […]
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This Is What Happens When Vintage Robot Voices Make an Album
We hope that music will always have tribes of people keeping esoteric traditions alive – your Renaissance musical ensemble, your Slovenian folk instrumentalists. It just happens that electronic technologies have attracted their own followings, cultivating knowledge of Texas Instruments chips found in specific arcade games the way some people might maintain a balalaika. Chip singers […]
Peter Kirn - January 15, 2015
Stories
How A Plug-in Recaptured the Robot Voices of Your Childhood
I’ve just gotten lost making my computer sing. And now I can’t stop. You see, a funny thing happened on the way to the future. As speech synthesis vastly improved, it also became vastly more boring. Intelligibility robbed synthesized words and singing of its alien quality, which was what made it sound futuristic in the […]