September 8, 2000

11:53 PM

MC Hawking in da ho-use! Damn straight! You don't know Da Good Doctor till you get his phat beats in your ass. Or something. Check out the MP3s, yo, and move while you groove to the discography, news and pictures. Wicked science by day, masta gansta rapper by night. Byatch.
posted by dan_of_brainlog (9 comments total)

Does anyone know of any software, either Web-based or desktop, that is capable of taking some text and generating Hawking-style speech from it? Lucent's text-to-speech converter comes close to doing it, but it's not quite right....the pitch and pacing are off. Any help would be appreciated.
posted by jkottke at 7:44 AM on September 9, 2000

the mac os has decent text to speech (and voice recognition) functionality built in, that's what i think was used to make the rather wack hawking tunes

which incidentally, owe a lot to these guys (check out 'Straight Outta CompUSA')


posted by sawks at 8:26 AM on September 9, 2000

>the mac os has decent text to speech

I just tried it out on the Mac at work....the "Fred" voice is right on.
posted by jkottke at 10:02 AM on September 9, 2000

Yeah, that sounds like Fred to me (in the Hawking songs) to me. The only good Window's freeware text to speech program I know of is DECTalk, downloadable at http://www.ultranet.com/~rongemma/indext.htm. The voices aren't as great, but it's a pretty flexible program, with its own rudimentary markup language for making steady tones, inserting wav files, and speedig up or slowing down the output.
posted by kidsplateusa at 10:12 AM on September 9, 2000

They ported DECTalk and released it?

That used to be The Best Synthesizer On The Planet. The hardware was $4000...
posted by baylink at 12:29 PM on September 9, 2000

I prefer MC Harry.
posted by muffin at 2:01 PM on September 9, 2000

Yo! I'm glad you guys like the site. Tell everyone you know and keep checking back, I'm gonna try to update the site every Thursday.

FYI, I used WillowTalk to create the voice of MC Hawking (a custom voice based on "Paul"), although a Mac in my office at work was the catalyst that launched the whole sordid mess.
posted by mchawking at 7:36 PM on September 9, 2000

Holy shit. I believe that mchawking now owes me a new pair of pants.
posted by milnak at 3:12 PM on September 10, 2000

there is a net.artist from moscow who let's his computer sing classic rock hits for quite a while now. he's using a soundblaster 16, textassist 1.x and midi files from the net. check it out at www.easylife.org/386dx/

there were quite a few dancefloor hits lately which used text-to-speech synths. like cylob of rephlex rec. london or mr. atom heart, with pop artificielle on rather interesting rec.
posted by klubradio at 7:42 AM on September 12, 2000