If you listened to the National Weather Service Weather Radio in the US about 25 years ago, you’ll no doubt remember [Perfect Paul], one of the synthesized voices used to read current conditions and weather forecasts. The voice came from a DECtalk DTC01, a not inexpensive voice synthesizer first made in 1984 that also gave voice to [Stephen Hawking] for many years.
Long obsolete, the DECtalk boxes have a devoted following with hobbyists who like to stretch what the device can do. Some even like to make it sing, after a fashion, and [Michael] decided that making a DECtalk sing “Xanadu”, the theme song from the 1980 [Olivia Newton-John] musical extravaganza, was a good idea. Whether it actually was is debatable, and we’ll take exception with having that particular ditty stuck in our head as a result, but we don’t judge except on the merits of the hack.
It’s actually easy if you have a DECtalk; the song is a straight ASCII file with remarkably concise instructions on which phonemes the box needs to generate. Along with inflection, tone, and timing instructions, the text file looks almost completely unlike English while still somehow being readable. The DECtalk accepts the file over RS-232, which would be easy enough to do with a modern computer, but [Michael] upped his game a bit by using a TRS-80 Model 100 computer as a serial terminal. The synthesized song is in the video below, with the original included for reference by those who didn’t experience endure the late disco-era glory days.
DECtalks seem pretty rare in the wild, so we appreciate this glimpse at what they can do. There are other retro speech synthesizer hacks, though: the simulated walnut goodness of the Votrax and the MicroVox come to mind, as does the venerable TI Speak and Spell.
Hilarious.
Can he do requests?
Please?!
Should do vocal tracks for all the floppotron tracks that have vocals LOL
Sure! Just let me know what you wanna hear :-) It has to be a song from the “Flames of Hope” website though.
The later part of Xanadu was much better, sounded more like singing than the early part.
I used to have a TI-99/4A with speech synthesizer, had fun getting it to say words that were outside its conventional english phoneme set. Getting an intelligible “Taj Mahal” out of it took a lot of work.
Flames of hope?
Sorry I dont get the reference.
I thought RW nailed it with floppy drive songs.
Eye of the tiger would be a good one.
Flame of Hope is the name of the website that hosts a lot of DECtalk content: http://theflameofhope.co/DECTALK.html
My dear hacker fellows, thanks a lot for all the requests, but I’ll need some time to set it up again. I’ll post them on YouTube in a week or so, please stay tuned! Cheers Michael
haha, this is great indeed.
I stumbled upon this link for more speech synthesizer songs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQmp_i41dAQ
Hi, Can we have a link to the site / text used for “All DECTalk Songs” Video?? Thanks!
sorry all I have is the link to the video, i guess that for more info you will need to contact the person who posted the video on youtube
http://theflameofhope.co/DECTALK.html
I’m ALMOST sure this was just an excuse to trollollollolloll us.
… and Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday, really?
2001 is… ummm… rather special? :-D
Honestly though, no rickroll?!? :-p
For about $50 you can get the fantastic Emic 2 breakout board which does the same as the DecTalk gadget: https://www.parallax.com/product/30016
I spend many hours of hilarious fun working with this thing and even did a Stephen Hawking tribute song:
https://youtu.be/SmFfAiSqIE4
The Emic 2 breakout board, for about $50, does the same thing as this gadget. Hours of fun working with this thing. I produced song with Stephen Hawking rapping about black holes like a gangster:
https://youtu.be/SmFfAiSqIE4
Yes I have used the emic 2 as well but switched to the text to speech mikrobus module from Mikroelektronika. Same Epson chip. And already uses dectalk v5. Many of the songs do not work with v5 though and require hand editing. Hence dectalk v2 is better for singing ;-)
https://hackaday.io/project/165677-lambdaspeak-3
Is the Amiga speech narrator device at all related to the DEC talk ?
https://youtu.be/SmFfAiSqIE4
The problem with the DCT01 was that it had the switch on the front. I would often find the one I had connected to the network monitoring system turned off as it was “irritating”.
There is a modern product that also does DECtalk. soo:
No EDIT? Nice… So anyway, see:https://www.adafruit.com/product/924 It does “Industry-standard DECtalk text-to-speech synthesizer engine (5.0.E1)” I will try some of the ‘songs’ with mine, which is part of my home automation system, driven by an Arduino MEGA. Sound output is great; cheap, goes around corners, easy to wire to other rooms. And with unobtrusive Morse Code buttons, I can lie in bed in the dark with my eyes closed, find the button and control the system.
I have used the Email 2 on a previous version of this project
https://hackaday.io/project/165677-lambdaspeak-3
But have switched to the text to speech board from Mikroelektronika which uses same Epson chip as the Emic 2 hence same Dectalk v5.
Okay, somebody get this guy a Karoke machine and put this thing to music….
My comments seem to be blocked. What’s going on?
Looks like our spam filter is getting a little over-enthusiastic these days. I think it was that you posted a link without any comment, then followed up with two quick posts. Just a guess, though – who knows the mind of Akismet?
I pulled them out of spam and approved them. Feel free to ping us on the tips line, or hit the author directly, if you ever feel you’ve been incorrectly moderated. We do our best to keep up with comments, but as you can imagine, it’s like keeping back the tide.
This link may be of interest:
https://www.msu.edu/course/asc/232/song_project/dectalk_pages/DECtalk Singing.html
Correct on URL
https://msu.edu/course/asc/232/song_project/dectalk_pages/DECtalk%20Singing.html
This gives me some heavy duty grade school dr. sbaitso flashbacks
I once had my tandy 100 talking using the old DigiTalker chipset … that was a fun project, used it for voice feedback on a ham repeater.
Check out my project LambdaSpeak 3 here for modern DECtalk based on Epson S1V chip.
The links to the project
https://hackaday.io/project/165677-lambdaspeak-3
My dear hacker fellows, thanks a lot for all the requests, but I’ll need some time to set it up again. I’ll post them on YouTube in a week or so, please stay tuned! Cheers Michael
FWIW, I used the DECTalk on a device I created for voice-challenged folks back in the mid ’80s It’s called a DynaVox, by Sentient Systems (later to be known as DynaVox Inc.). If you can find one, it contains a TMS320 DSP for the vocal tract model, and a 68000 for the text to phoneme work. There is a secret back door to allow full access to all the hidden DECTalk features, such as singing, high-hat to make the classic millennial-speak hi-hat at the end of every sentence that makes everything sound like questions. This is all accessible via the RS-232 port. All the voices are in there too. I loved it when the kids all personalized their voices to me some flavor of Huge Harry.