jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (05/17/85)
> My impression of alot of her stuff is that it sounds as if she just found > this great new toy, the Fairlight CMI, and she's just bound and determined > to make every kind of strange noise she possibly can with it. This reminds me of a question that has been bothering me for a long time. Back when the Apple* Macintosh** personal computer first came out, there was a demo disk distributed to various dealers, etc., of a voice synthesis program [it's the one that had different names over the early part of the product life, names like MacinTalk, MacTalk, etc., and I don't know the name it has now or had then]. Included with it was a little demo that recited the well-known "In the olden days, before 1984, not many people used computers, and for a very good reason: not many knew how, and..." story. Well, if you looked in the text file that contained the text of this message, there was a delimiting string at the end of the message, something like "#####", and then some more phonetic text. If you took out the "####", after it got through telling you about Apple, it would start giving you a little talk about how the Fairlight CMI*** worked! Why is this? Was that voice synthesizer made by the same people who make the CMI? Or is there a version of it that runs on the CMI? or what? * Apple is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. ** Macintosh is a trademark licensed to Apple Computer, Inc. ***Fairlight and CMI are trademarks of Fairlight Instruments [I think] -- Full-Name: J. Eric Roskos UUCP: ..!{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!vax135!petsd!peora!jer US Mail: MS 795; Perkin-Elmer SDC; 2486 Sand Lake Road, Orlando, FL 32809-7642 Gel guvf nznmvat rkcrevzrag! Gnxr n znfxvat gncr ebyy vagb n qnex ebbz. Jnvg sbe lbhe rlrf gb nqwhfg. Chyy bss fbzr bs gur znfxvat gncr. Jngpu pybfryl juvyr qbvat fb.
gus@Shasta.ARPA (05/20/85)
> This reminds me of a question that has been bothering me for a long time. > Back when the Apple* Macintosh** personal computer first came out, there > was a demo disk distributed to various dealers, etc., of a voice synthesis > program [it's the one that had different names over the early part of the > product life, names like MacinTalk, MacTalk, etc., and I don't know the > name it has now or had then]. Included with it was a little demo that > recited the well-known "In the olden days, before 1984, not many people > used computers, and for a very good reason: not many knew how, and..." > story. The name of the program was indeed Macintalk. It fell into obscurity after last spring when it first released, was re-released (with better sound) in December to a few developers, including myself, and is now on the verge of falling into obscurity again. I really hope that Apple finally finishes off the contract work on this thing and releases it completely. Macintalk was written by the same people who wrote SAM (Software Automated Mouth) for the Atari and Apple II. They were commissioned early on by Apple to do a Mac port, and it appeared in the original Mac demo in January, '84 (on a 512K Mac!) Over the past year, I have been able to collect bits and pieces of old Macintalk junk including the Mac/Fairlight script mentioned earlier. The New (December '84) Macintalk sound a lot better. It sounds like a a computer in its mid 30's rather than an old man who's false teeth are out for repair. I had the opportunity to do a fair amount of Macintalk hacking this winter when I wrote ShuttleClock, a timeline reminder clock to remind experimenters on the ground of various events occurring in Spacelab 2 to go up in the Space shuttle this summer. There are two modules - Macintalk and Reciter. Macintalk goes phoneme to speech, and Reciter goes from text to phonemes. Since I had to do text to speech, and the timelines I was reading had a lot of strange vocabulary, I had to disassemble the entire reciter code in order to get at the text- to-phoneme rules table. (They promised to have this available in the next release, but I couldn't wait...) I found that I had to do a lot of tuning to get words to sound right, and I added a lot more words than I thought I would have to, but the result is a very nice sounding program which, I hope, will do its job well.