1985 digital sound voice synthesizer demo AN ORIGINAL DISK

In 1985 I wrote this in BASIC and a few bytes of ASM for 4 different brands of computer and if I was known for doing anything in high school, this was it, the only thing mentioned about me in my yearbook. I would also leave these disks at computer stores and computer club. Although it is now known that the synthesizer is (capable of) higher quality than MP3, my means of programming sounds into it in the 1980's never had a reasonable explanation for why it worked at all, (and I now know that it simply didn't!,) and in the 1990's other unique methods were tried while this one was considered to be the worst kind of digital sound ever invented. The disk "apparently" has male female and robotic TTS voices, 2 songs, and a few talking games on it. But it seems to have been proved an accidental illusion.

An analysis of my sound track does not indicate characteristics consistent and typical of the sounds intended to be heard.

"Warning:You may hear voices that aren't real." :)

Category:

Music

Tags:

• 1985
• diy
• text
• to
• speech
• and
• music
• synthesizer

[Amishman35]

I'm thinking what you did was tell the music/beeper chip to produce a low-frequency square wave near DC and then wiggle the volume level in a for/next loop with 1 bit DATA statements to make it sound like digital sound.

[VironCybernet]

Interesting guess, vaguely close. The disk runs on any Apple II, which can only make click sounds by using PEEK(-16336) to click the speaker. Very primitive! There are no analog to digital to analog converters involved with this at all!

(And at only around 1000 clicks per second it also violates the Nyquist theorem. 2 songs and 3 TTS voices on a 128K diskette.)

P.S. Your stuff is interesting. Didn't you make record grooves on CD's before I did?

[ipadloops]

I remember in the 80s, when I was in sixth grade, a short digital recording of The Who's Baba O'Riley floating around the BBS. I played it on my Apple IIe all the time. Was that you who sent it out? At the time this was a really amazing thing.

[evansdm2008]

You did it by tuning a radio receiver into a frequency range corresponding to the machine's cycles

[soniccolorsboy]

can u get on u tube??

[amithacker1]

LOL what a computer

[tubemaster2703]

@CoolDudeClem Looks like an apple 2.

[adriankeibord2]

old

[EA78751]

super cool!

[storerestore]

At least the VIC-20 has somewhat useful sound production hardware, and there's no way you'd hear what they were saying in Robotic Liberation without the subtitles.

[jci10]

Bah! and piffle. My 1Mhz, 4kb Vic-20 can outdo this. Do a youtube search for "Robotic Liberation" and see what real old-skool asm speech synthesis computing is boyz & girlies...

[MalaTemporaCurrunt]

oingo boingo !