TI 99/4A - The Singing Computer - Just for Fun

[pixelpedant]

An old Compute! article I'd run into a short while back and the heading "The Singing Computer" inspired me to try my hand at encoding pitch-manipulated (i.e., "sung") speech for the TI 99/4A (albeit for use in XB, which does not allow speech pitch to be directly modified, but rather, if at all, adjusted via bitwise speech pattern manipulation). So for funzies, here's a short TI synthesised song I put together (on real iron), in principle for my dear wife, but which you might get a kick out of as well.

 

Further details are available in the linked video and in my TI Synth Editor thread. If anyone else is looking to do similar, you may find a chart I compiled of TI speech pitch/frequency equivalencies in practice (i.e., what a pitch value of "111111" or "63" produces, in terms of sound frequency) useful.

 

I'd include source, but honestly, there's nothing too interesting there. It's just reading the speech data from files and putting some words on screen, really. But if anyone wants it, I'll get it off my TI 99.

[Opry99er]

Neat!! over that song, as does my own wife.

 

 

Do you have a Terminal Emulator 2 cartridge by chance?

 

A similar feat can be accomplished much quicker and within a single TI BASIC program, though I can tell you I've never gotten extremely deep into pitches.

 

Pitches are adjustable though in TE2.

[pixelpedant]

Indeed, the Compute! article linked describes the (simpler) approach to producing pitch-adjusted speech in this manner in TE2. However, it's also more limited. Mainly, as without the ability to freely adjust the duration of syllables and their constituent structure, it's difficult to sing a song. The best one can do is reduplicate allophones in some cases (which wouldn't work for diphthongs). What's more - the built-in vocabulary and syllables constructed from TE2 allophones are themselves necessarily not of equal duration to one another, so what you get is more like just notes/syllables of arbitrary duration.

 

So in the opening passage of You Are My Sunshine, syllables/notes should be of these relative durations:

 

You(1) Are(1) My(1) Sun(2)shine(3)

 

And that's what we'd want to achieve. Which we can. But really only by editing the speech itself.

 

This is a challenge faced as well to an extent in editing the speech directly, in that, because English syllables are of radically varying phonotactic complexity (compare: "he", "strengths"), and the "time-resolution" if you will of the synthesizer's speech is not particularly great (20 frames was the target duration I used for quarter notes), more complex sounds will tend to be inherently longer. Where there is no real correlation between phonotactic complexity and note duration in music at all (i.e., "strengths", as a word composed of 7-8 phones depending on dialect, is not customarily sung for four times the duration of "he", usually consisting of 2 phones).

 

However, in my case though, I also wanted to do this in Extended BASIC to a large extent just because I wanted a solution I could expand upon in Extended BASIC.

[ti99iuc]

i have somewhere on my archive "O' Sole Mio" song where TI-99 is the singer

i have to find and share

Edited July 3, 2018 by ti99iuc

[pixelpedant]

i have somewhere on my archive "O' Sole Mio" song where TI-99 is the singer

i have to find and share

 

I would very much enjoy seeing that!

[+OLD CS1]

HAL, sing "Daisy."

[pixelpedant]

HAL, sing "Daisy."

 

Ooh, that would be a tempting choice!