You can type in lyrics, and immediately hear the results sung back to you, something the original chips couldn’t do in tune. And the software allows these chips to perform whatever you ask them. CDM has had world-exclusive early press access to Chipspeech, our chance to roam the possibilities of the software emulations.
But historical chips are a non-renewable resource some are plentiful, others rare.Īnd there are advantages to reimagining these in virtual form.
Now, the chips themselves are great fun to work with for hardware geeks, whether directly or in circuit-bent form. Montreal’s independent plug-in maker Plogue Art et Technologie embarked in a somewhat ludicrous labor of love, curating a collection of the greatest chips of yore and then painstakingly recreating them in software. And the result is one of the most enjoyable digital instruments to play you’ll see this year. These are the bots that sung Daisy Bell in the first-ever computer serenade, that have been featured in classic electro and techno records – and, perhaps, that inhabited your toy bin or represented your first encounter with the computer age, intoned in clicking, chirping magic.īut in a revolutionary transformation, you can make them do more than just speak. To fans of robotic baritones and sopranos, a particular chip can represent the Stradivarius or Steinway of machine song. But it’s also loaded with character.Īnd there’s a history here.
It’s weird-sounding, to be sure, to the point of sometimes being unable to understand the words. Intelligibility robbed synthesized words and singing of its alien quality, which was what made it sound futuristic in the first place.Ĭhipspeech takes us back to speech synthesis as many of us remember it growing up. As speech synthesis vastly improved, it also became vastly more boring. You see, a funny thing happened on the way to the future. I’ve just gotten lost making my computer sing.
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