Speech for the VIC WITHOUT special hardware

[PhilRanger]

Anybody ever looked at this? Looks like it could work on a VIC. Anybody has a list of the frequencies produced by the 3 oscillators (36874,75,76) instead of notes?

http://www.haskins.yale.edu/featured/sws/tonecombo.html#

[matsondawson]

That's pretty cool, of course there's already the Robotic Warrior/Liberation demos. I wonder if they works similarly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiN2F1o2qwY

[Vic20-Ian]

Isn't there speech in Berzerk MMX?

[Kananga]

Anybody ever looked at this? Looks like it could work on a VIC. Anybody has a list of the frequencies produced by the 3 oscillators (36874,75,76) instead of notes?
http://www.haskins.yale.edu/featured/sws/tonecombo.html#

Although it is always valuable to try things in different ways, my first shot at synthesizing speech on the VIC would be to use samples for allophones.
E.g. the SPO256 used in many speech modules uses 59 allophones stored in an internal ROM. Playing back 4-bit samples at 4kHz should be enough for speech, but I doubt enough samples fit into the RAM of the unexpanded VIC. A challenge?

Composing the audio signal from different frequencies (using the oscillators of the VIC chip), should it be possible, doesn't help here.
If I read the referenced article correctly, you have to modulate the frequencies over time, which is just another form of sample, e.g. information to store somewhere.

*) Just found this:
"Speech! uses about 8K of memory for player and sample data. The samples are stored as packed 4-bit values to send to the AY"

[16KVIC20]

Isn't there speech in Berzerk MMX?

There is indeed. I was quite amazed.

[PhilRanger]

I reversed engineered berzek and I'm toying with my own sampler. Crude example: Vic plays the intro to "Walk this way" from aerosmith (8k expansion).

http://www.box.net/files#/files/0/f/112 ... _938218722

I think I can do better, quality wise and size wize, this was just a quick "proof of concept". MP3 files go to frequency domain to reduce the quantity of information without too much damage (remember, we're talking 8 bits here!). Delta encoding might help too. Using the oscillators can act like vocoders from cell phones as well.

[PhilRanger]

Zero downloads? I just realized 2 things:

1-

I think my link wasn't good:

http://www.box.net/shared/ayctsv3kl5dxgv4885gk

Shouldn't ask a passwork (please let me know if this doesn't work)

2- It's not just cutes pokes to 36874-75-76, we're talking sampling from the original recording.

[orion70]

Well, one download more . This can be an interesting new field for VIC development Phil, but I don't get how the sampling is done, nor if also speech can be sampled (only 2 seconds of music in the prg you posted). Sorry for my poor knowledge in this matter.

[TLovskog]

Downloaded ok and worked like a charm. Really cool stuff.

[Vic20-Ian]

Back in the days when I had a plus/4 I remember a type in that allowed Analogue to Digital conversion via the tape deck.

You placed an audio tape into the cassette deck and sampled to memory then could play back with basic effects by pressing the function keys.

It was pretty impressive for a type in.

I am sure the Vic could replicate it with enough ram expansion e.g. FE3. Could be a good use of Kananga's ram disk mode?

I can't remember the magazine or type in name but it was possibly Commodore User or Your Computer around 1985/7.

Any Plus/4 users remember this one?

[PhilRanger]

The main limitations are

A- Memory! 2 ways to look at it: (supposing memory in all blocks, keeping 200 bytes for overhead)
1- Max time = (39200 bytes free).(8 bits per byte) / ( (number of bits per samples).(sampling rate))
example: 39200*8/(4*2000)=39.2 seconds

2- Max sampling frequency = 39200*8 / (nb bits per sample*time)
example: my file is 10 seconds and I'll encode it at 4 bits per sample
sampling frequency=39200*8/(4*40)=7840 samples per second.

B- Only 4 bits on the volume (poke 36878,0-15), but can be extended by using PWM (but this lowers the sampling rate). I'm working on this now, but I'm still unsure if more bits sounds better than higher sampling rate

The "Walk this way" demo used only 7 KB, not the full memory

I transferred a mp3 file to CBM prg STudio through cool edit, wordpad and excel

[Boray]

I have a couple of old sample demos here:
http://user.tninet.se/~pug510w/datormus ... ml#samples

[PhilRanger]

I have a couple of old sample demos here:
http://user.tninet.se/~pug510w/datormus ... ml#samples

What sample rate/depth did you use?

[Boray]

Back in the days when I had a plus/4 I remember a type in that allowed Analogue to Digital conversion via the tape deck.

You placed an audio tape into the cassette deck and sampled to memory then could play back with basic effects by pressing the function keys.

It was pretty impressive for a type in.

I am sure the Vic could replicate it with enough ram expansion e.g. FE3. Could be a good use of Kananga's ram disk mode?

I can't remember the magazine or type in name but it was possibly Commodore User or Your Computer around 1985/7.

Any Plus/4 users remember this one?

No, but I modified a c64-tape player once to record and playback. I have it somewhere. It used 1-bit samples so you could store pretty long samples but it sounded terrible. (8 samples per byte).

[Boray]

Here, uploaded it for you:
http://user.tninet.se/~pug510w/datormus ... ampler.zip

It's two .d64 files.