Do It Yourself Project Ideas

[bplus]

Re: Steve's link

Yes I do remember having to alter the text with some one-liners because punctuation or something was not coming out right audibly. Mostly timing of words, I think I had to insert spaces mostly or change 's to just s. It's been awhile... If you really get into this, you might build an editor to write and replay jokes until they sound right.

And some jokes might work better with male or female voices or with accents from different locals.

[PhilOfPerth]

I've never used Powershell before - wasn't even aware it existed!
It's definitely worth a closer look... maybe somone could elucidate for us "mere mortals"?

[madscijr]

What I want to figure out is how to make the voice change pitch and sing musical notes. 
Back in the 80s we had a program called SAM (which stood for something like "Software Automated Mouth") for the Commodore 64, and you could change the voice's pitch inbetween words or syllables, to make it sing. If we could get our paltry 64k 8-bit computers to do that back when Reagan was in the White House, it should be a breeze on a modern PC that's more powerful than the most powerful supercomputers they had back then!

(Here is a disk image to run in an emulator.)

[bplus]

@PhilOfPerth the most I've heard about Powershell comes from Spriggsy, as I recall he had nice file selection dialog materals and other Windows Utility apps.

@madscijr Singing! wow that is way beyond telling jokes! Right, if it could be done with old Commodore you'd think we could do it with QB64.

[SMcNeill]

What I want to figure out is how to make the voice change pitch and sing musical notes. 
Back in the 80s we had a program called SAM (which stood for something like "Software Automated Mouth") for the Commodore 64, and you could change the voice's pitch inbetween words or syllables, to make it sing. If we could get our paltry 64k 8-bit computers to do that back when Reagan was in the White House, it should be a breeze on a modern PC that's more powerful than the most powerful supercomputers they had back then!

(Here is a disk image to run in an emulator.)

https://qb64phoenix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=249 -- volume, speed, voice, and all are changeable herre.  I don't know about pitch with MS built in voices, but espeak does that.  (I think.) https://espeak.sourceforge.net

[madscijr]

eSpeak, you say? I'll check that out. 

Or else maybe directing the MS voice to a file or a buffer in memory and manipulating the pitch directly using @Petr's sound filter / speed / pitch code? (Not at computer so don't have a direct link, but the thread here wasn't too long ago.)

[Pete]

@bplus

"... it ended in a tie."

Well +1 for telling me one I hadn't heard.  

Okay, here's one of mine.

Where do you go to find a FreeBASIC developer with an I.Q. of: 200. ?

A dyslexia clinic! .002

Hey, I should at least get a +1 for keeping politics (sort of) out of it for once.

Pete

[madscijr]

@madscijr Singing! wow that is way beyond telling jokes! Right, if it could be done with old Commodore you'd think we could do it with QB64.

Exactly! SAM could probably be recreated from scratch in QB64PE (by someone smarter than me! LoL)

[madscijr]

I was mostly joking about recreating SAM speech from scratch, but I googled it and it's been reverse engineered and recreated numerous times, even in vanilla JavaScript. I'm surprised how many ports have been done, including Web-based, ES6 JavaScript, C, more C, GoLang, Raspberry Pi, Unity, SDL & VST. Also here's the original manual and a detailed page on the Atari version.