Thursday, December 11, 2014

Speech Synthesis Choir



James Houston created a Christmas greeting for the Glasgow School of Art last year using obsolete equipment to generate old-school synthetic speech singing “The Carol of the Bells.” The idea is about  repurposing Christmas gifts of the past.
The ensemble: A collection of vintage Mac computers, a Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum + 1 and a SEGA Mega Drive perform a rendition of "Carol of the Bells" with lyrics re-written by Robert Florence & Philip Larkin in the Mackintosh Library at The Glasgow School of Art. Jacket by Ten30.co.uk (Alan Moore, GSA Textiles alumnus 2008).
We also get the appropriate 8-bit graphics on nearby screens. You won’t be able to understand the lyrics, but they are posted at the vimeo page- and they are hilariously geeky! (via Metafilter)

2 comments:

  1. I'm impressed that they got all those old computers working first of all. Second, that is some mad programming skills. Getting speech out of those old computers wasn't easy

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  2. Neato bosso!
    -WDitot

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