Re: Ensoniq capabilities

[scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us (Scott Alfter)]

In article <alpine.LNX.2.02.1302141522110.15069@darkstar.example.org>,
Michael Black  <et472@ncf.ca> wrote:
>On Thu, 14 Feb 2013, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 14 Feb 2013, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>>
>>> Phoneme synthesis with the Ensoniq would only require about 64 short
>>> prerecorded phonemes and standard phoneme synthesis software--quite simple,
>>> actually, but having the usual "robotic" speech quality.
>>
>> I almost wonder if a GS could do something like Vocaloid or if that's pushing 
>> the cpu too far.
>>
>Steve Ciarcia had a "Circuit Cellar" in Byte, I think it was 1978, where 
>he showed how to give a computer some speech output.  He did it the simple 
>way, sample the words, then play them back.  He was obviously using a 
>fairly low sampling rate.
>
>The problem with that was storage space.  It was for an 8bit computer, so 
>RAM was limited to 64K.  I can't remember if he was using a floppy drive, 
>but even then that was limited compared to what's available today, 350K at 
>tops.

Way back in '85 or '86, I wrote a speaking math-drill program that ran on my
IIe as a Boy Scout project.  I used some audio recording/playback code
cribbed from Nibble.  Words were sampled one-at-a-time and saved to disk. 
Since I didn't have a hard drive, I preloaded the samples into /RAM and
loaded them from there in sequence to get it to say what was needed. With
just numbers and a handful of operators needed, not much storage was needed. 
It actually ran at a halfway-decent speed, even though it had to load words
one-at-a-time (so that "6*3=18" would load samples for "six," "times,"
"three," "equals," "eight," "teen" in sequence.)  Loading samples from RAM
disk kept the delay between samples to a minimum.

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