[sugar] New activity: Speak

[Edward Cherlin]

On Jan 10, 2008 12:05 PM, Joshua Minor <j at lux.vu> wrote:

>
>
> On Jan 10, 2008, at 11:23 AM, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>
> > On Jan 10, 2008 1:27 AM, Joshua Minor <j at lux.vu> wrote:
> >> Hi everyone,
> >>    I made a new activity called Speak....
>
> >>
> >> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speak


> >> Also, if anyone has experience or ideas on how to get access to
> >> espeak's per-phoneme timing data from python, please let me know.
> >>
> >> -josh
> >
> > Do you want to do that while running, or would a precomputed table
> > meet your needs?
>
> I would like to get callbacks for each phoneme while the voice is
> playing, so that I can shape the mouth correctly for each one.  If
> done well, this could be a nice visual cue to help understand the voice.

Plus a new accessibility feature. The illiterate deaf who can read
lips would be able to use the XO. Upstream would greatly appreciate
that.

At some point we could think about a matching cutaway view of the
vocal tract for language learners. I would love to see you animate the
Xhosa 'x' and 'q' clicks (See Miriam Makeba, The Click
Song/Qongqotwane), and all of the different 'rhotic' sounds (flap r as
in Japanese, trill as in Italian, hard retroflex as in southern New
Jersey, Boston, German gurgle, etc.).

"Izu zato 'aru' azu in Rondon, oru 'elu' azu in Loma?"
"Ar-r-r-r-r-r-rivider-r-r-rci, R-r-roma..."
If you haven't heard the south Jersey dialect, I can't convey it to
you. You won't hear it on House MD, but you should.
"Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd."
German, spoken, not sung. An uvular trill before a vowel. "Grün, alles
grün, so rings und rund."

Hey, wow, it's been done! Well, only the static positions on this
site, but presumably there is more elsewhere.

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy.html
INTERACTIVE SAGITTAL SECTION

> I would also have to rework how espeak is wired up to gstreamer.
> Right now I have espeak write out a wav file and then I play that
> back via the gst module.  I wasn't able to get them piped together in
> a reliable way.  Specifically when I run espeak --stdout and then
> attach that to a gst pipeline that starts with an fdsrc, it only
> works once.  I was not able to restart or rebuild a new pipeline to
> speak another sentence.
>
> -josh

-- 
Edward Cherlin
Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay