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Comment by julian37 | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, try running this on a Mac:

  say -v cello d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d

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Or this:

    say -v cello droid

that's hilarious - and amazingly ironic

Just went through the OS X speech synth voices and I recognized some being used in quite a few electronic music productions, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK2NG28vKNw

Radiohead used the Mac voice a bit on their 'OK Computer' album. Obviously on 'Fitter Happier' and in the background on 'Paranoid Android'.

Also, I believe Pixar used the Mac voice for the ship's navigation computer in WALL-E

Marilyn Manson used the voice on certain tracks on Antichrist Superstar.

According to Wikipedia:

The song "Man That You Fear" by Marilyn Manson ends with the MacInTalk voices repeating, "When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed". Also, during live performances of "Antichrist Superstar", the MacInTalk voices repeat "You might as well kill yourself - you're already dead" at the end of the song.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk

say -v Fred Fitter, Happier, More productive

Also on a related note, try Win+R this on Windows:

    mshta vbscript:CreateObject("SAPI.SpVoice").Speak("Hello, Y Combinator")(Window.close)

In an ideal world:

  say -v joshua Shall we play a game?

I wonder why the 13th note is wrong compared to the original melody.

There used to be these commands in the pre OS-X TTS system that let you specify arbitrary pitch/timing for the synth. People could make songs with it.

There still are! Macintalk hasn't changed much since then.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...

Thanks! I think I have my next weekend project.

The Amiga speech device had a nice phoneme grammar you could use to make it say all sorts of odd things.

The one that stuck with me, and still amuses my kids, is 'uuuuuuuuuuuuuuu' on the Amiga (comes out as "yuyuyuyuyuyu" in a slightly descending tone).

Or this:

    say -v cello foobarfoobarfoobarfo foobarfoofoobarfi

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