penny lane (1073 hits)
Category: Sound & MusicRating: 2 on 4 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by <lodnem.at.yahoo.com> (View user info) at 2003-02-10 14:38:40 EST
this is kinda old news for computer geeks like me, but it just played in my winamp player and i thought someone here might find it interesting / entertaining.
microsoft is working on (bought a company who was working on) text to speach and voice recognition technology. one of their pet projects was to take, as input, a human voice then mimmic it with a computer. to take it one step further, they programmed the computer to sing in the voice of the user that supplied the input.
the results are interesting, and you can hear for yourself how a computer sounds when singing penny lane. it's not exactly mariah carey at the nba all star game in a tight dress with ample cleavage, but it certainly sings better than she does.
the project is called whistler (not to be confused with XP that was called whistler when beta'd in the sdk).
check it out, a quick d/l...
http://www.research.microsoft.com/srg/whistmusic/Penny_8.wav
User Reviews
Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2005-12-22 12:15:37 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by lodnem (user info) at 2003-02-12 17:44:27 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
i guess what entertained me the most about this is that it's entirely musical, unique and entertaining. while it doesn't sound like a human being, it sounds like nothing else and that makes it quite innovative.
i was impressed, but will it replace a real singer someday? i don't think so. what i love the most about music is that it comes from human beings. i really love hearing a great song that arose from someone's life experience and i enjoy the flaws in their delivery that make it one of a kind.
i found this trivially entertaining, but not moving, if that makes sense.
Submitted by Razor (user info) at 2003-02-12 14:24:12 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Just to expand a bit... the interesting thing here to me is that 20,30 years down the line, a songwriter could very well feed a computer lyrics and chord progressions and say "rip me a copy of this song sung by Sarah McLaughlin, Mariah Carey, and Patsy Cline" and they would come out sounding not synthesized at all.
Submitted by Razor (user info) at 2003-02-12 13:44:00 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I found this very interesting, and so did my coworkers.