Fw: [sdiy] OT: Singing Software

[Theo]

 Dave Krooshof declared:

 > Speech is _old_. It runs on pre system 7.5 computers.
 > I think it even runs on 68040 Macs (pre PPC).
 >
 Don't know if we are thinking the same speech, but I used a speech
generator
 on 6800 macs,
 don't read that text, just sitback and listen :)
 Something similar was available for the Atari ST too, named (surprise)
 STspeech.
 Both work with sampled phonemes (sp?), no easy way to sing.
 (yeah, yeah, I know Amigas can do the trick too)

 However I did my first computer "singing" long before the first Mac existed
 using a TI99 4A with speech cardige.
 The TI speech sounded way better than the later Atari/Amiga/Mac efforts.
 Programming was a bit tricky though.
 There was a library of 300 words and you needed to cut-up and resequence to
 make 'new' words out of these.
 You could do this in basic, but for singing you needed to dive a bit
 deeper..
 Every word existed of a number of frames (not samples), each frame having a
 set of parameters.
 This allowed to set the pitch of the frame and some other things.
 But you had to write in assembly code to access these parameters :(
 The best thing however, it sounded horrible ;)

 Theo