>> As an aside, I had an idea while reading the documentation and papers
>> around bol2, of an onomatopoeic synthesiser. Instead of sending a midi
>> note to such a synthesiser you could just send a string of text, such as
>> "krrrnnk!" or "booooeee?" Much like a speech synthesiser but the aim
>> wouldn't be to make understandable phonetic speech, but rather a simple,
>> learnable mapping between arrangements of letters and sounds. It would
>> seem a natural way for specifying diverse sounds very quickly in a
>> controlled manner. It seems a fairly obvious idea but I couldn't
>> immediately find reference of anything similar existing.
>
>
> you could use mbrola / praat.
> it would be a very nice way to do music sometimes..
I also think this would make a great project, both fun for the user, and a
potentially highly audience-accessible 'live coding' tool (not necessarily
with a full language element). Yet if somehow you devised a programming
language of onomatopoeias
utter = ow + aargh!
which both were sonified as code as typed and themselves generated more
onomatopoeic code...
For generative strings of noise wordiness I start to think of Dave's long
tokens of GA generated functions.
On the research precedence issue, there are bound to be some, that's the
way of research life with all those clever active humans around, but
perhaps not anything exactly the same; I can't think of such a project off
hand.
There are plenty of electroacoustic pieces and voice works that use
nonsense words and deliberately evocative sound words to paint, from Ligeti
Aventures, Swedish tape/vocal music of the 60s, Lansky's Idle Chatter etc.
The machine learning part be a great way to personalise the synthesiser to
your own favoured sounds, though collating any database of ground truth
might be unwieldy; using existing speech synthesisers as Julian suggests
would be one shortcut. You might also look into 70s style nonstandard
synthesis as making a language for converting token strings into basic
synthesis operations (see Roads Computer Music Tutorial).
best
N
Received on Sat Oct 28 2006 - 09:46:47 BST