Staticfree Blog

Singing computers rule.

So much so that I decided the lojban text-to-speech that I'm working on needed to be able to sing. Well, it turns out that festival 1.4.3 has a cute little .scm file that lets you create XML files marked up with musical notes and durations for singing. With a little bit of poking around, I was able to convince our lojban voice to want to sing. With a little more poking around and about an hour trying to translate, I put together: "Daisy" (as in the song HAL9000 sings when Dave kills him in 2001).

Continuing the same theme, I was pointed out this project (which I had tried first, but which failed miserably): Flinger. Some of the examples are amusing, not in their badness, but in their resemblance to the pop music's tendency to use vocal distortions on actual singers.

Also, if you've never heard them before, a geek or two put together this impressive 386dx singing computer. They even have a hard-core music video!

Last weekend was excellent; last weekend was insane. Friday I went to Anime Boston, getting there around noon. I went straight to the registration line, as I had missed the pre-reg by one day. After waiting in line for 30 minutes, I began to notice that the line wrapped all the way around the mezzanine and then some.

Two hours, 10 games of Tux Racer, 5 Jolly Ranchers, $40, and spurious small talk later, I got through the registration line. I watched some anime and eventually met up with Tashari and Pete. We ate and eventually made our way over to Harvard Square where we met up with James for Manray. Manray was fun, filled with scantily-clad men and women dancing to loud, good music. I eventually trundled home.

Saturday, I made it back to Anime Boston in time to see the Chibi Project live and met up with Tashari and Pete again. I attended a few panels on various video games, in hopes to learn more about them. Learned that I still don't play video games (really?) and that many gamers are stinky (in other words: I learned nothing new). I eventually gave up on panels, and wandered off in search of humans.

I encountered Fluffy who was hanging out with some nifty-looking people. There I met Freya, who has turned out to be very cool. We talked a bit and eventually joined up with Tashari and Pete again. Quite hungry from a long day of animeing, the 4 of us went out for dinner at Thai Basal on Newbury St.. As the con had pretty much died down, Tashari and Pete headed home. Fluffy, Lucky, Freya and I all decided to go to Rocky Horror that night, so we had oodles of time to kill. Lucky was at the masquerade, Fluffy went home, so Freya and I ran off to a quiet room to watch videos on my laptop.

Which brought us to Rocky Horror, which was the usual silliness. There was a particularly silly 4-20 opening and the cast did a gender swap (female chars were played with male actors, etc.). All in all, there was an adequate amount of hot women (and at least one fairly cute guy) so all was well. We finally went home thanks to a ride from Fluffy. Thus ended my insane weekend.