[PD] [OT] Voice Synth

[Bryan Jurish]

moin Georg, moin list,

On 2007-06-02 12:34:18, Georg Holzmann <grhPD at gmx.at> appears to have
written:
> Hallo!
> 
> Bryan Jurish is the speech expert in pd world ;) ... you can find all 
> his stuff here: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~moocow/projects/pd/

Thanks for plugging my site Georg... saves me some typing ;-)

> There are the ratts and flite externals. I think he also made an 
> external for the mbrola speech synthesizer, but did not release it ...

Sorry, never made an mbrola external -- mbrola is closed-source
free-as-in-beer-ware.  Somebody (I forget who) wrote a MAX external for
mbrola a few years back, and unto him did I praise and extol the wonders
and glories of flext, but lo, the release was binary, and it was only
unto the Mac, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I did make an ugly-hack patch at one point using ext13 (pipein~?) to
talk to mbrola over named fifos, but it never worked particularly well.

I have another (far, far uglier but at least functional) system that
looks like (pd <--(OSC)--> perl <--(TCP)--> festival --(system
calls?)--> mbrola --> temp files --> pd), but the guts are all freely
available (SayWhat is the perl part, festival works "out-of-the-box",
and my patches basically require my entire patch library, which I'm too
lazy to package at the moment).  If anyone is terribly interested, I can
tar up my whole pd patch library and point you at the relevant patches.

> Yes, for the pd radio I used the flite external, which is quite okay but 
> only english ...

It's allegedly possible to compile a flite library for any festival
language-model built with the festvox tools (note: this does not include
German: AFAIK the only festival support for German is from IMS
Stuttgart, they've stopped supporting it, and I personally have never
gotten it to compile, even after much wailing, gnashing of teeth, etc.)

I'm not sure how well the pd flite interface actually supports multiple
languages -- I've only ever tested it with the default english models.
It should be pretty straightforward to compile & link it against an
alternate flite library though.  If anyone succeeds, I'm happy to
discuss how to go about generalizing the build procedure.

marmosets,
	Bryan

-- 
Bryan Jurish                           "There is *always* one more bug."
jurish at ling.uni-potsdam.de      -Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology