Elektron Musical Instruments

On Sun, 17 Nov 2002, oldmanfury wrote:

> I think that the "secret" project elektron refuses to talk about is 
> porting SAM the "Semi Automatic Mouth" from the original C64 machine 
> code over to SIDStation.  They liscensed it from SoftVoice Inc.  This 
> program was essential - the best voice synthesizer at the time.  I 
> used to crank-call people using it.  

Heh heh, I guess I'm not the only one that did that.  I had a 1660 modem 
hooked to my C64--that was the one that had an audio splitter cable, since 
it supported touch tone dialing by using the C64's SID to generate the 
tones. :)  I wrote a little program that generated the appropriate tones 
when you pressed the relevant keys (0-9, #, *), had the function keys 
mapped to text strings that'd be sent to SAM (and could be redefined on 
the fly), and you could always hit Return and type whatever you want to 
be output through SAM.  Pretty silly, really, but at the time I had fun 
with it, having entire phone conversations just tapping function keys and 
typing away.

SAM stood for "Software Automated Mouth" actually, and I believe it was 
distributed by Don't Ask Software.  To this day I've never really heard 
any significant advances in voice synthesis, or at least text-to-speech.  
SAM had some pretty impressive text-to-speech capabilities considering its 
low memory footprint (maybe 12-18K?  I can't recall...).

> If elektron really was going to add SAM to the sidstation, I'd buy 
> one.  As it stands, I'll just have to be happy with quadrasid and my 
> MD :)
> -gerald

Maybe they'll include it in their mythical SAMpler.  :)  That'd seriously 
be a good idea for a generator to bundle with.  I like the idea of an 
Elektron sampler, but I'd be really keen on it if you could do all sorts 
of whacky stuff without ever having to hook up an external input.  
Basically, I'll take the feature list appearing in an earlier message, 
plus, oh, something on par with a NORD modular plus SAM for internal 
sample generation. :)

-- 
R. Cliff Young <nukenin@...> /\/ Chaos Never Died
	http://www.roguebard.com/