MIDI-to-Speech Converter?

[Steven Curtin]

At 08:00 AM 4/23/98 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi List !
>
>I remember seeing Kraftwerk in the late '70s .  I distinctly remember 
>that someone was actually playing a sort of typewriter keyboard 
>(selectric type) and was actually producing the singing voice .  
>After the show we went to the stage, (this was in a uni auditorium, 
>just walk on :) and i recall seeing very weird signs on the keys, 
>looking something like phonemic characters .  I'm sure it was used 
>real time .  Analogue built of a vocal tract maybe ? and then 
>controlled by something like an adressable bank of trimpots ?  Just 
>guessing .

It could have been a Voder- this device allowed a keyboardist to produce
singing vowels by activating combinations of formants.  Maybe someone built
one for them.  For more information see:

http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/machines/vocoder/

My former boss at Ensoniq, Bill Mauchly, made a plugin for the ASR-10 that
emulated the action of the voder using keys on the keyboard.

http://www.pan.com/soundengine/WAVEBOY/voder.html

Steve C

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Steven Curtin  
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Lucent Technologies - Bell Labs Innovations
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