"Bare-handed speech synthesis"

March 22, 2017 @ 6:38 pm · Filed by under Computational linguistics

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This is neat: "Pink Trombone", by Neil Thapen.

By the same author — doodal:

March 22, 2017 @ 6:38 pm · Filed by under Computational linguistics


4 Comments

  1. AntC said,

    March 22, 2017 @ 11:05 pm

    Thanks Mark. Neat and so much fun! (on an iPad)

    The 'User Manual' is here https://m.youtube.com/watch?ebc=ANyPxKpTGoty36n22nakl55Y971bPSLbpUkPNVPiq1cJ5_pSLDBL7W9YcYrZm5xOPi17rx_w75lwpg_65wWYeZVmvaM58_jatA&v=7LGnozlwU1o

    Even after watching that, I can produce speech-like sounds, but not anything I could recognise as connected language. It just needs too much controlled coordination.

    How babies could ever learn to control all those bits is beyond me.

    [(myl) Babbling! ]

  2. Adrian Morgan said,

    March 23, 2017 @ 8:12 am

    Re Doodal: I wonder how many people remember Dick Oliver's "Fractal Vision" (or "Fractal Grafics" as other versions were called) back in the early 90s. I still have my copy (which runs in a DOS emulator) as well as the 485-page manual.

  3. Dan Lufkin said,

    March 23, 2017 @ 9:34 am

    The fractal nature of language would be an interesting topic to kick around for a while. There are a few Ghits along that line, but the idea doesn't seem to have affected main-line linguistics much. (Now watch me get savaged.) Zipf's Law suggests that there's something deep going on but so does Bode's Law (qG). I recall that Noam Chomsky could demonstrate that Zipf's Law was an emergent property of logarithms but I can't reconstruct the details.

    I'm glad to see Fractal Vision mentioned and fondly recall Fractint and the Stone Soup Group and Rollo Silver's Amygdala newsletter. Fractals inspired a lot of clever programming a generation ago; perhaps Doodal will spark some new concepts. It looks promising.

  4. Matt McIrvin said,

    March 23, 2017 @ 9:35 am

    It seems to me that Pink Trombone needs teeth. It can't say the consonant D very well.

    [(myl) It would also be good for it to be able to store and replay time sequences, in a format that could easily be manipulated as the output of an articulatory synthesis program.]

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