Elektron Musical Instruments

>   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.  

You should search for anything called "experimental phonetics".  
There is alot of study in speach and it's synthesis.  I've never 
heard of SAM.  As I linguist I don't care for text to speach.  
Although this is good for practical reasons (the blind), writing is 
independant of the production of language.  I would prefer a program 
that allows me to make the different basic speech elements such as 
the consonanats or vowels.  Something that emulates the mouth and 
articulation, etc.  This would be a great machine to add to the MD.  
Could call it a Vox-Box.  It could at least make it sound like some 
vowels.  I'm sure we could make the consonants with the current 
machines.    

But there is that program called SayIt.  You can get it from that 
DirectX site.  You type it in the program and it makes a voice.  You 
can save to a wave file with it.