it's great fun
and who needs LPC or concatenative synthesis when you can make good use of
Karplus-Strong and a Formant filter... thanks for the description below.
Alex, you're aware of the component of the Cylob Music system for speech
synthesis aren't you?
<
http://durftal.com/cms/vocal%20sequencer.html>
he doesn't theorise it in terms of live coding and the possibilties you
show in the video, but it might be worth referencing? He uses a DIY speech
synthesis approach like you that gives speech with (uncanny?) character,
having spent a long obsessive time himself mapping out English phones...
best
N
--On 14 August 2007 23:21:13 +0100 alex <alex_at_lurk.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 12:10 -0700, Amy Alexander wrote:
>> very cool! i've posted a comment but don't see it appear on the blog.
>> does this blog wait for moderation or did it just send my comment
>> straight to the /dev/null page?
>
> They're held for moderation... Sorry I didn't realise that the software
> didn't make this clear to the commenter, I'm going to switch to
> wordpress soon I think.
>
>> this is really cool! can you explain a bit more for relative laymen how
>> it works? it might seem to the uninitiated at first to be a speech
>> synth + vocoder, but it sounds like there's something else going on.
>> in any case, i think it's an especially apropos + entertaining use of
>> the visual side of livecoding.
>
> Well it is like a really broken speech synth.
>
> It seems in this area there's an important balance to be struck. On one
> hand you don't want to necessarily make music with a speech synth,
> because it's too much like a human voice. It's like it's difficult to
> stop yourself trying to search for meaning and listen to the sound.
>
> On the other hand I want the ease of composing sounds with text, where I
> can easily play around with words, having some idea of what a word will
> sound like. Also the results are a bit like speech, so hopefully a
> listener can quickly get used to how the sounds are constructed and
> relate to each other, because these relationships are similar to human
> words/speech.
>
> I guess it's also a bit like the idea of an 'uncanny valley' in
> robotics. Broken speech synthesis sounds nice, but if it's more like
> human speech, it just sounds rubbish in comparison, or maybe even
> menacing.
>
> On the technical side, the Karplus-Strong algorithm is just a delay loop
> with a filter, with feedback. You put some white noise in the delay
> loop, it feeds back on itself but because of the filter quickly smooths
> out (rather than making the usual nasty feedback whistles). This acts
> and sounds much like a real plucked string does, which is why it's
> called physical modelling synthesis.
>
> Once I made that I took two parameters; the length of the delay loop and
> the probability 'blend' value that controls how 'drumlike' it sounds. I
> picked a pair of values for these parameters for each consonant in the
> English alphabet, my aim being to find a good range of sounds that sound
> a bit like the letters I'm assigning them to, so fricatives harsher and
> more percussive than more open sounds.
>
> For the vowels I'm just applying a formant filter which really does make
> it sound like human vowels.
>
> I think what makes interesting sounds though are 'articulations'. I'm
> not switching between the parameter values, but moving between them
> quickly, creating diphthong type effects.
>
>
> alex
>
>
Received on Wed Aug 15 2007 - 07:45:38 BST