Speech Synthesis Choir
December 11, 2014 5:28 AM   Subscribe

 
Man, so much nostalgia when he unpacked that 1530 tape drive. I saved my lawn-mowing money for months, then wheedled Mom into taking me to Service Merchandise to get one.

Anyway, this is great. Thanks, ClanvidHorse.
posted by ob1quixote at 5:56 AM on December 11, 2014 [1 favorite]


wow
posted by mary8nne at 6:09 AM on December 11, 2014


No BBC Micro, so I do not approve.

When I was twelve, the Z80 vs. 6502 cultural divide mattered. We shall not speak of the ZX Spectrum, for it has a Z80 architecture and is Clearly Wrong.

And for those on the side of light, truth and reason there was only one path: BBC Micro 4 Evah. Commodore jockeys - No Assembler, No Truth.

Don't get me started on the keen, critical criticism of the dialectic of BASIC dialects.

Model B. 32KB of RAM. Up to 27KB (Video Mode 7 - Teletext) available to the hacker. You can do *anything* in 27KB.

Many years later, I caught up with some of the women who had been girls at school with me. "We thought you were cute, but you never talked to us."

Damn.
posted by Combat Wombat at 6:10 AM on December 11, 2014 [1 favorite]


That's cute.

Back in the days of my Xtranormal cartoon series I created The Glampire, an epic 5-part rock opera using the site's speech synthesizer software. (Not to plug myself too shamelessly, but come on, how could I skate past an opportunity like that? I mean, just how often does "music created with speech synthesizers" come up in conversation?)

Anyway, you can't say I lacked ambition.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:13 AM on December 11, 2014


Lovely!
posted by carter at 6:27 AM on December 11, 2014


The BBC Micro had a speech synthesis option which used samples (well, phonemes) of Kenneth Kendall, an actual BBC newsreader, through a TI chip. Was it fun to make one of the nation's favourite, most-trusted voices say rude things? Oh boy, was it ever.

Not that this excused the poor choice of the 6502 CPU, which managed what speed it could muster by not bothering to have any registers and forcing all manner of unhealthy practices to get any use out the mutant zero page and stack abominations. Such things rarely mattered to the rich kids who could afford a Beeb, or the intellectually stunted pixel-sniffers who went for the Commodore, which fortunately left the field clear for the gifted punk coders who gleefully took the excellent Z80 architecture and made it soar, Shove SP in video RAM and eat dust, mofos!

(I seem to remember that the Currah uSpeech came with software written by Scottish programmers, who managed to get it to say "Peterhead" as "Peterheid". Now that's class.)
posted by Devonian at 6:44 AM on December 11, 2014 [1 favorite]


How can anybody hate on robot Christmas? C. Wombat, you need to put aside those old prejudices. Everyone's equal in the old folk's home.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:54 AM on December 11, 2014


The Commodore 64 justified its existence with the 6581 SID. Surely even you Z80 infidels can recognize that. ;)
posted by Foosnark at 6:59 AM on December 11, 2014 [2 favorites]


the intellectually stunted pixel-sniffers who went for the Commodore

That's just weird. I had a C64 and actually snorted pixie stix once.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:07 AM on December 11, 2014 [2 favorites]


I wonder how hard it was from him to find still working computers of each model.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:42 AM on December 11, 2014


Peter Birkholz's Vocaltractlab sings Pachabel.

Really old school sung vowels.

First singing computer.
posted by stonepharisee at 12:29 PM on December 11, 2014


Sad to think that, just a few months after this video was made, Glasgow School of Art burned.
posted by scruss at 3:52 PM on December 11, 2014


I can almost pick out lyrics. What are the speech synthesizers singing? It almost sounds like "just plug us in" at one point.
posted by matt_arnold at 7:23 PM on December 14, 2014


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