Originally Posted By: Mark Hayes
Remember Macintalk, the "drunken Scandinavian in an oil drum"? He didn't provoke any sort of emotional response, other than yucks. He was a funny robot voice.

You're talking about the version of Software Automatic Mouth that was ported to the Mac. I'm well aware of the program, as I've read and documented the disassembled source code, and written a version in Lua that can sing. laugh

The later versions of SAM are very intelligible and even capable of singing fairly well.. I'd gotten a hold of the company a number of years ago in hopes of convincing them that perhaps using them with BiaB (I've got some code that will convert between MusicXML and other formats). But that never panned out. frown

Originally Posted By: Mark Hayes
But now, robot voices have gotten to the point where they're beginning to enter the Zone of Indistinguishably, and they can sound almost but not quite like humans, and for me, that's where spooky, quasi-emotional phenomena start intruding.

Much like how replicators in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy can create something that's almost, but not quite, like a cup of tea. wink

For me, it's enough that it can demo the song. The important bit - for me - is that I can get a level of expressiveness out of it that wasn't there before.

But compare it to an actual person singing, and it's like day and night.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?