make the CPC speak and sing

[sigh]

It is possible to make the speech much clearer by fine tuning the words, but it doesn't sound like the Roland programmers spent much time trying to do this.

Bryce.

Is the Techni-musique the same in ram/cpu consumption as the SPO?

What interests me is having this used while playing an actual game. Software speech is too ram hungry for this to happen.
The C64 with it's SID chip was able to handle speech for games like Way of the exploding Fist while playing.
It makes me wonder if that could of been possible on the CPC by using the SP0 instead of samples.

Man....so much unexplored areas with this machine

[McKlain]

I think that everything on the c64 took less cpu time and less ram than on the cpc.

[BSC]

What interests me is having this used while playing an actual game. Software speech is too ram hungry for this to happen.
The C64 with it's SID chip was able to handle speech for games like Way of the exploding Fist while playing.
It makes me wonder if that could of been possible on the CPC by using the SP0 instead of samples.

I don't know what you mean by SP0 but I think that trying to use phonemes (or formants) is a really interesting approach.
It might not be (very) usable in a game, but I think that depends.

I wonder if anyone here happens to have done anything related to speech synthesis using formants. A couple of samples
would be a great start, I think. I googled around a bit yesterday and one thing I wound was this:

AUE: Formant values for 14 Fontana vowels

So it's basically 3 frequencies per vowel. Another interesting site I found:

Lecture 017 Instrument IV

[gerald]

As you can see in my video for "Roland In Space", the CPC is talking and also simulteanously loading the game from disk...

Yes, and this is wrong  .
On a real CPC "Roland In Space" will start loading only at the end of the speech (More precisely, only once the last phoneme has been send)

While is possible to speak during disk activity (like it's done with the AY), Roland In Space does not do it !

old discussion on SPO256 / SSA1 : Amstrad SSA-1 Speech Synthesizer ROM needed

[sigh]

Sorry - I meant the phonemes:)

With the Roland example and El Enigma de Aceps, even creating voices like grunts and shouts would be an incredible step.
I'm guessing the more complicated the the speech pattern, then the more difficult to use.

[PhilZeVibe]

The main reason why I don't like hardware speech synthesizers very much is their limitation in one languaged phonemes only...
Sure, the Techni-Musique sounds pretty nice, but it's limited to French language...

Edit: This of course also included the limited phonemes inside the SPO speech chip.

It's only the software of Techni-Musique that's limited to French phonemes.
You can use the hardware (MEA8000 chip) directly. Then you're not limited to any particular language.
That's because the MEA8000 doesn't use a predefined ROM, contrarily to the SPO chip.

The MEA8000 really generates speech on the fly. It's not a simple phoneme ROM player like the SPO chip.

[BSC]

I wonder if anyone has every tried to generate or steal phonemes or formants samples and play them on the CPC.
Apart from the great speech RSX extension I mean..


(*dream mode on*)
It would be sooo cool if someone out there had done this already and could provide me with a
set of samples which represent all the formants needed for e.g. english language (others like samoan, middle-old north-western welsh
or kölsch could always be done later) which I could incorporate in AYAY to play around with.
(*dream mode off*)