
Digitizing speech on a piano - iamelgringo
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/10/mechanical_reproduction_of_digitize.html
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unwind
This is awesome. I think the title is misleading though; it's about
_reproducing digitized speech_. This converts the already digitally
represented sound to actual analog sound, audible by humans. The output device
is a by cleverly (and mechanically) played classical piano.

The resulting voice sounds like a bad special effect, but is really cool since
it isn't. :)

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Luyt
However, if you don't look at the subtitles it's quite hard to recognize the
words. Showing the subtitles of what you're supposed to hear is called
'Prompting', an effect which is also used by backward-speech advocates.

~~~
mynameishere
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1NoOOoaNw>

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Luyt
That's hilarious... and illustrates the awesome power of prompting.

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bitwize
This is steampunk, man. Even more pimp than that demo with synthesized speech
on a Commodore VIC-20.

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yan
Note to self: create better post titles. :)
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=862590>

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jacquesm
If you read up a bit on how mp3 compression and GSM work then you'll find that
in essence they rebuild the sound from a very limited number of frequencies.

Very nice find, and extremely impressive the speed with which the keys are
manipulated.

I wonder if it is possible to have a human learn the key sequences of the
dominant frequency bands and make a piano speak a word or two.

In neuromancer there is a head in villa straylight that speaks with organ
pipes iirc.

~~~
bk
> I wonder if it is possible to have a human learn the key sequences of the
> dominant frequency bands and make a piano speak a word or two.

I was wondering that too. Imagine if a composer in pre-digital history had
figured out something like that and as a final "chord" to a piece had let the
piano speak a word.

Literally awesome.

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revorad
You mean something like that? - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9D-kUEp03c>

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tetsuo13
It's fascinating to listen to but I wonder about extending it to other
languages. Does American English lend itself well to this sort of thing or are
other languages and accents reproducible. I imagine that languages with much
harsher stops like German or Russian would be more difficult and those that
are easily broken down, like Japanese, would be even easier than English.

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zoba
This seems like it might have some similarities to sine wave speech synthesis.
Of course, its far more impressive with a real piano.

<http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Sine-wave_speech>

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NathanKP
Too bad it didn't mention how many hours of time went into designing and
programming that system. It must have been an incredible amount of work.

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miloshh
Ah, the power of a least-squares fit. :)

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willchang
There doesn't seem be any fitting involved. I think he just took the speech
spectrogram and used it as a piano score. Thus the acoustic output of the
piano is not meant to approximate the acoustics of talking. We hear speech
nonetheless because there's enough of a speech-like signal for our auditory
functions to hold on to.

~~~
elblanco
The human auditory system does a remarkable job of filling in missing data.
Sometimes it's amazing.

For example we can:

Hear a song we recognize, playing softly in the background, in a crowded noisy
room

Talk and understand conversations over the telephone even with it's amazingly
small bandwidth

Understand speech with something like 70% signal loss

Hear the cry of a baby in the middle of a battlefield over the sound of guns

and on and on and on

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jazzychad
I find it particularly interesting that words that end in hard consonants
(like T or D) are represented by very high-pitched keys to create the
percussive sound (especially noticeable at the end of the video). This is too
cool.

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zandorg
Very very amazing!

On another subject, I want some kind of 'piano player' with pistons like this
piano, and you attach it to a non-MIDI instrument and it plays the keys via
MIDI data, without having to retrofit it electronically.

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shaunxcode
Seeing as it is on MAKEzine I am upset there are not plans to build your
own... Seriously that would be one hell of a weekend(s) project. Writing the
software/midi stuff sounds fun too!

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geuis
Very interesting but the damn reporter talked too much. I wanted to hear more
of the piano.

~~~
elblanco
IMHO it needs more cowbell.

~~~
elblanco
And they need to explore the studio space more.

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elblanco
This is the coolest thing I think I have ever seen (or heard for that matter).

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detcader
I've always wondered whether this could be done with a piano... thanks!

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fdkz
somehow related :)
[http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/02/speech_synthesis_in...](http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/02/speech_synthesis_in_the_year_1939.html)

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tfh
_Kulturzeit_ is probably the best program on german TV..

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chaosmachine
more examples of this technique here:

<http://ablinger.mur.at/docu11.html#qu3>

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chrischen
My piano already does this. I can talk into a mic and it converts it into
notes. It just doesn't mechanically play the keys.

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petercooper
So Sparky's Magic Piano could _really_ have happened after all :)

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ars
wav2midi?

Anyone?

