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make the CPC speak and sing

Started by sigh, 00:31, 08 February 14

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sigh

Quote from: BSC on 22:59, 07 February 14

You seem to be making a lot of games :) Anywhere on the interwebs where I can see / download them?
And I hope you are not planning or hoping for sampled music like in the example videos you posted over there?
Like, with speech / singing? That would not be possible with the current version of AYAY. I was thinking about
using phonemes (a bit like in this oldskool speech rsx extension which sounded quite good) as wave forms
instead of the basic forms like triangle, sine etc. But that's a completely different story and I have currently no
clue whether that would be feasible at all - I might be dreaming away here ;)


Anyway: I think it should be possible to combine those kind of games with the AYAY engine. It could become a
quite painful developing process, though.. But we are developing on the CPC .. in 2014 .. we like pain, right? :D

Definitely no speech or singing!!! :D

With your SID program, integrating phonemes would be very interesting indeed.

If you go to 0:30...


Amstrad CPC Gems 2 - El Enigma de Aceps

McKlain

El Enigma de Aceps was groundbreaking, the first text adventure in spanish with good graphics and synthesized voice. But the guy had a weird pronunciation  :laugh:

Devilmarkus

[ot]El Enigma De Aceps made use of Superior Software's Speech. (Perhaps with spanish phonemes)

You can easily include it into games.

The program:

http://www.cpc-power.com/index.php?page=detail&num=4372[/ot]
When you put your ear on a hot stove, you can smell how stupid you are ...

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McKlain

Quote from: Devilmarkus on 10:48, 08 February 14
[ot]El Enigma De Aceps made use of Superior Software's Speech. (Perhaps with spanish phonemes)[/ot]


Could be, but the voice says "pilamide" instead of piramide.

sigh

Quote from: McKlain on 11:09, 08 February 14

Could be, but the voice says "pilamide" instead of piramide.

I wonder if by breaking down the words phonetically and fine tuning each phonetic part with the pitch and speech, you could get something sounding more human?


Amstrad CPC - Speech Synthesis

Devilmarkus

Quote from: sigh on 12:37, 08 February 14
I wonder if by breaking down the words phonetically and fine tuning each phonetic part with the pitch and speech, you could get something sounding more human?


Amstrad CPC - Speech Synthesis

Is it just me, or does this video don't have any speech audio? (I can hear the floppy drive noises from WinAPE but no AY output)
When you put your ear on a hot stove, you can smell how stupid you are ...

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Gryzor


Devilmarkus

#7
I watched the whole video... There's no audio for me, just crackling and, @ beginning the emulated floppy noises...

Edit: Hahahahaaaaaa Youtube doesnt playback on my left audio channel?!?!? WTF???? is there a balance slider somewhere?
When you put your ear on a hot stove, you can smell how stupid you are ...

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gerald

Quote from: Devilmarkus on 20:33, 08 February 14
I watched the whole video... There's no audio for me, just crackling and, @ beginning the emulated floppy noises...

Edit: Hahahahaaaaaa Youtube doesnt playback on my left audio channel?!?!? WTF? ??? is there a balance slider somewhere?
Did not get any sound as well except (sort off) the emulated floppy either on windows 7 64bit or linux 64bit.
However, the sound is fine with the video saved locally and played with VLC. Flash player bug ?

Devilmarkus

Maybe, yeah... But we are going too off topic here, I think ;)

Lets get back to topic better
When you put your ear on a hot stove, you can smell how stupid you are ...

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ralferoo

Quote from: Devilmarkus on 20:33, 08 February 14
I watched the whole video... There's no audio for me, just crackling and, @ beginning the emulated floppy noises...

Edit: Hahahahaaaaaa Youtube doesnt playback on my left audio channel?!?!? WTF? ??? is there a balance slider somewhere?
I couldn't hear it either. Just the loading noises.

Devilmarkus

Well, here's the DSK for Speech:

(perhaps useful for SID things, too?)

When you put your ear on a hot stove, you can smell how stupid you are ...

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BSC

Quote from: sigh on 12:37, 08 February 14
I wonder if by breaking down the words phonetically and fine tuning each phonetic part with the pitch and speech, you could get something sounding more human?


At least that's what I was thinking about. I did some reading concerning phonemes (mostly vocals, though) and IIRC they basically consist of 2 predominant frequencies.
And I also remember the waveforms to be rather simple.. Anyway: I think that would be a cool project to try to figure out what audio data is needed to recreate a human voice (and reverse engineering this speech extension could be a good starting point) and if the wave forms turn out to be simple enough to fit with the AYAY player, it could be possible to make the CPC sing :D
** My SID player/tracker AYAY Kaeppttn! on github **  Some CPC music and experiments ** Other music ** More music on scenestream (former nectarine) ** Some shaders ** Some Soundtrakker tunes ** Some tunes in Javascript

My hardware: ** Schneider CPC 464 with colour screen, 64k extension, 3" and 5,25 drives and more ** Amstrad CPC 6128 with M4 board, GreaseWeazle.

BSC

Quote from: Devilmarkus on 13:03, 08 February 14
Is it just me, or does this video don't have any speech audio? (I can hear the floppy drive noises from WinAPE but no AY output)


No sound for me as well. But this video does have sound:


speech v1.1 for Amstrad CPC - YouTube
** My SID player/tracker AYAY Kaeppttn! on github **  Some CPC music and experiments ** Other music ** More music on scenestream (former nectarine) ** Some shaders ** Some Soundtrakker tunes ** Some tunes in Javascript

My hardware: ** Schneider CPC 464 with colour screen, 64k extension, 3" and 5,25 drives and more ** Amstrad CPC 6128 with M4 board, GreaseWeazle.

sigh

Quote from: BSC on 21:04, 09 February 14

At least that's what I was thinking about. I did some reading concerning phonemes (mostly vocals, though) and IIRC they basically consist of 2 predominant frequencies.
And I also remember the waveforms to be rather simple.. Anyway: I think that would be a cool project to try to figure out what audio data is needed to recreate a human voice (and reverse engineering this speech extension could be a good starting point) and if the wave forms turn out to be simple enough to fit with the AYAY player, it could be possible to make the CPC sing :D

That would probably be the ultimate 8 bit speech software!

What I find really impressive about this type of speech is that you can combine it with music.
Go to 0:42


SSA-1 Speech synthesizer used in CPC game "Roland in space"

I take it that the ram and cpu consumption must be very small using this type of speech?

If so, it would be interesting to hear one of these voices over the richness of the SID tracker.

McKlain

Didn't the SSA1 mix it's own sound output with the AY output using it's internal stereo mixer? My cousin had one and it came with two little speakers.

TotO

This hardware speech is worst than software speech done on some games like Robocop.
"You make one mistake in your life and the internet will never let you live it down" (Keith Goodyer)

McKlain

Robocop uses samples, as far as I know.

Bryce

Quote from: McKlain on 12:28, 10 February 14
Didn't the SSA1 mix it's own sound output with the AY output using it's internal stereo mixer? My cousin had one and it came with two little speakers.

Yes, both the SSA-1 and the DKtronics Speech Synth have their own amplifier that mixes the 3 AY channels with the voice output, so both can play at once. Both also use the SPO-256 speech chip which is phonetic based speech, so it will always be worse than sampled speech. 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.

Devilmarkus

#19
The Amstrad SSA-1 just collects few bytes sent to it's port and plays the phonemes for itself.
So no real CPU power needed here.
The voice is already generated in the SPO-256 chip and just played back by this series of bytes.
DK'Tronics speech works in the same way.

Both don't need much CPU power.

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

In my video I extra turned the volume for AY output down to concentrate on voice output.
When you put your ear on a hot stove, you can smell how stupid you are ...

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Devilmarkus

You can try the game also here:
(With emulated SSA-1 speech)



If you get trouble in allowing java applets after the latest java update, just ask me... There's a solution for it....
When you put your ear on a hot stove, you can smell how stupid you are ...

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TotO

Quote from: McKlain on 13:16, 10 February 14
Robocop uses samples, as far as I know.
And Morteville Manor ?
The Techni-musique speech syntesizer sound definitively better. (MEA8000)

Ordinateur Amstrad cpc 6128 synthetiseur vocal
"You make one mistake in your life and the internet will never let you live it down" (Keith Goodyer)

Devilmarkus

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.
When you put your ear on a hot stove, you can smell how stupid you are ...

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McKlain

Quote from: TotO on 13:53, 10 February 14
And Morteville Manor ?
The Techni-musique speech syntesizer sound definitively better. (MEA8000)

Ordinateur Amstrad cpc 6128 synthetiseur vocal


The techni-musique plays on another league compared to the SSA1.

robcfg

Yep, I have to agree on this.


The SPO256 barely sounds like english, while the Techni-musique can sing...

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