VowelSynth - Playable DIY speech synthesizer

Matt Gilbert (who blog-watchers will remember as the creator of the scrollbar scarf) has been thinking about speech synths: "Speech synthesis is usually about converting text to speech, but what if you approached it differently?" He designed a great-looking instrument out of curved wood, string, rubber bands and faders. As you press on the strings, it triggers a Max/MSP patch which emulates a voice. It's can't speak, but gets pretty close to singing. As ever, this makes no sense until you see this slightly freaky demo video [QT](thanks, Roberto)

Posted by Tom Whitwell.

Comments:

This is awesome. It's yet another way to play that totally useless "yow-I-yah" quasi vocal patch found on all Korg and Yamaha synths since around the time of the Prophecy and the EX5. Nothing musically valid has yet come from it.

I also waste my time. But, unlike me, at least he's trying eh.

# posted by

Anonymous : 6:19 am

I like it. The design is simple and graceful, and I think the usage of rubber bands is brilliant, especially if the tension is sending CCs, not just on/off. Hard to tell from the video exactly what's happening there, but I'm impressed!

# posted by

Anonymous : 6:52 am

There's a typo in the copy for this blog entry. Where it says "almost singing" it should say "almost farting".

# posted by

Anonymous : 10:25 am

...you've obviously never tried south african shark paté.

# posted by

Anonymous : 3:05 am

Jesus man....use two hands.....or do something different in that video....you did the same exact hand motion for all two minutes of it.....

# posted by

Anonymous : 3:38 pm

Autechre will no doubt be making use of this for their next tour

# posted by

Anonymous : 4:07 am