Elektron Musical Instruments

On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, endlessnessisticman wrote:

> 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.  
[...]

Most speech synthesis software, SAM included, actually use phonemes to
represent the various speech sounds, perhaps with an additional set of
symbols to represent inflection or other variance.  The text-to-speech
algorithms convert English text (or whichever language texts are
supported) to a suitable phonetic/inflective equivalent.

I am impressed to this day by the text-to-speech algorithms SAM used, 
since they provided fairly good results for a really low memory footprint.  
I believe you also had the option of loading SAM without the TTS engine, 
in which case you had to provide the phonemes directly.

If you wanted to really micromanage pronunciation, or you were trying to 
deliver certain effects like "singing", you really wanted to bypass the 
TTS engine and deal directly with SAM via phonemes etc anyway.

SAM wasn't limited to the C=64, either--I believe it existed for at least 
the "big 3" 8-bit platforms (Apple ][, Atari 400/800, C=64) and perhaps 
others as well.

> 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.

You're referring to AnalogX, actually (www.analogx.com).  Some nifty tools 
to be found there.

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