Discussion

With the current abilities of LowRes NX, can someone ever create a speech synthesiser on it?

1

Jenifer the programmer 2020-08-26 01:24

Could LowRes NX ever run speech synthesis or Is it too weak to run it?


GAMELEGEND 2020-08-26 02:08 (Edited)

you can make your program make diffrent sounds depending on the input but you cant make it say any words

there are already a few programs where people have made text to sounds(mostly beeping sounds)



i know its abilities but I'm bad at explaining things sometimes


Jenifer the programmer 2020-08-26 02:51 (Edited)

Someone might be able to get voice recordings on here if they could figure out how to convert .wav files into math.

(Sound waves are math, so maybe recordings could be ported here)

A sine wave is sin(X) or cos(X)


was8bit 2020-08-26 05:14 (Edited)

I have made crickets, frogs, etc, so i would say YES, however it took me HOURS of experimenting with things to make any one sound effect i liked, so i would imagine it would take a TON of time to craft together enough phonic sounds to be able to make a few sounds....

The original "speak and spell" might be a good place to start.... this person here sampled and provides as wav files the original sounds :)

http://www.maximporges.com/2011/10/08/speak-and-spell-samples/


Timo 2020-08-26 06:45

I think it's not possible to make something understandable.
All speech synthesiser are based on sampling (playing recorded waveforms). With sine, saw and pulse waves alone you cannot achieve this.

Most of old 8-bit systems were able to play samples (although with very low quality). Some of them actually had hardware for it (PCM channels, even the Game Boy) and on others (C64) you could do tricks with pulse sounds to replay samples. But these required to have a very fast "connection" between the CPU and the sound chip.

In LowRes NX you can update the sound parameters only 60 times per second, because everything is sync'ed with the screen refresh. But this is to slow for audio samples.


was8bit 2020-08-26 08:06

Well, you know how PULSE settings can get really weird sounds... now IF one had precise control of WHERE or WHEN in the spectrum of those sounds it started, perhaps... as is, it automatically just keeps changing how it sounds as it continuously plays... now IF you could reliably reproduce a tiny portion so that it precisely always sounded identically the same, there are a few vowel sounds in there somewhere ;)


was8bit 2020-08-26 08:07

Then, using all 4 voices, one "MIGHT" get something that may loosely ressemble speach.... maybe....


Timo 2020-08-26 11:21

I think on the C64 they were resetting the pulse wave so quickly that it always had the maximum amplitude and then they changed the volume very quickly (like 8000 per sec) to "construct" the waveform from a recorded sample.

This is not possible with LowRes NX, because of the update speed.


was8bit 2020-08-26 13:19 (Edited)

Ah... but in NX does the PULSE's changing sounds come about "naturally" or is this "controlled" as in a value being changed that causes the change in how it sounds... if so, one could simply "set" the value and then create a portion of the sound they wanted..

I say naturally because (as an example) the visual moire patterns are not "contructed" but are a naturally ocurring phenomenon of placing 2 different patterns together, and so the wavey effects cannot be "captured" ... and a small portion of these waves cannot be "reproduced" on demand, they are a natural byproduct...


Timo 2020-08-26 16:58

The internal calculations of the waveforms are done at 44100 Hz, but you cannot change the parameters from the BASIC program at this speed. This is just the way the interpreter and the "emulator" works. There is no simple way to change it.

Of course I could add a PCM channel to LowRes NX which would allow sample playback, but I don't want to ;)


was8bit 2020-08-26 17:10

I had guessed as much... and of course no need towaste alot of energy on "rabbit holes" ... you create cool stuff (ie like both lowres's) i have always trusted your judgement :)

I think speach sythn is hard even for regular modern computers, the intellivision had a "speach" module you could by to attach to the thing, but it was a crappy result and only i think for one or two games and i dont think they ever officially got it off the ground and sold them publically...

so, as lowres is supposed to emulate an older gaming system, it followes it shouldn't have fancy things ;)

.... one could "type" text to the screen and do a low buzizng noise for each word added... that is what some older games did... that approach would be suitable for lowres :)


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