Posts Tagged robot choir
Five of Spades: Options
Posted by Angela Brett in Cadbury Heritage Collection, CERN, Fische, Hunde der Welt, Johnny English, Katzen der Welt, Kennedy Space Center, Lingo Pix, Models, NASA 50 Years, Scenic New Zealand, Space Shuttle, Wasservögel, Writing Cards and Letters on April 8, 2012
Note: This is a song-like thing. Here is an mp3 of my Mac singing it to approximately the right tune, just so you can get the same tune in your head that I had in mine when I wrote it. Feel free to make your own recording of it with human vocals and actual music if you wish. I make no claim of being musical, and I probably accidentally copied the tune from something. Sosumi.
If I can’t have this, then I’ll have that
If I can’t have a dog, I’ll have a cat
If I don’t like today there’s always tomorrow
If I can’t be Superman, I’m Bizarro
If I can’t have coffee I’ll have tea
If I can’t have a pool I’ll have the sea
If I can’t have chocolate, I’ll have cakes
If I can’t have cities, I’ll have lakes
But if I can’t have you there are no good fakes
So I’ll be very sad.
Well you can’t always get what you think that you want
But you can get something that’s just as nice
It is not very likely the thing that you crave
Will be the only thing that will suffice
If I can’t have Mars I’ll take the moon
If I can’t be first I’ll be there soon
If I can’t have shuttles, I’ll have Soyuz
If I can’t fly from you I’ll fly for youse
If I can’t have Skylab I’ll have Mir
If I can’t leave Earth then I’ll stay here
If there’s no zigazig I want all your base
If there’s no E.T. I’ll take the human race
But if I can’t have you there’s an empty space
And I’ll be very sad.
Well you can’t always get what you think that you want
But you can always want what you’ve got
It is not very likely the thing that you crave
Will be the only thing to hit the spot
If I can’t have ATLAS there’s CMS
If I can’t find the Higgs I’ll make another guess
If I can’t prove that, I’ll become a believer
If I can’t go to PAX I won’t be a reaver
If I can’t write songs then I’ll still write Things
and if my voice sounds bad my computer sings
If I can’t have Hexley, I’ll have Tux
If I can’t have a princess, I’ll have ducks
But if I can’t have you then that just sucks
And I’ll be very sad
Well you can’t always get what you think that you want
But you can always rehypothesise
It is not very likely the answer you seek
Is the only one that satisfies
If I can’t have some things I’ll have others
If I can’t have sisters I’ll have brothers
If I can’t have rhythm I’ll have rhyme
If I can’t have space then I’ll have time
If I can’t have proof then I’ll have trust
If I can’t make love then I’ll take lust
If I can’t have lovers, I’ll have nudes
And if I can’t have ladies, I’ll have dudes
But I can’t have you so we’ll have feuds
’cause I am very sad
Well you can’t always get with the person you like
but you can always find someone new
It is not very likely the one that you want
Will be the only one that’s meant for you
Well, they say there are plenty more fish in the sea
Though I don’t think they mean that literally
And while I can’t seem to stop the overfishing
I always can be careful what I’m wishing
‘Cause if I can’t be linked then I’ll be free
If I can’t have you there’s another three
And if I can’t have them then I’ll have me
And you’ll be very sad.
But you can deal with that:
Just find another lad.
Like this:
Get your own Mac to sing Still Alive
Posted by Angela Brett in News, The Afterlife on August 24, 2010
Somebody on Twitter mentioned he’d like the file I used to get my Mac to sing Still Alive, so here it is. If you have a Mac, you just need to open this in any application which can view text (TextEdit, for example) go to the Edit menu, Speech submenu, and select ‘Start Speaking’. You can try different voices by changing the system voice in the Speech pane in the System Preferences. For best results, use a high quality voice such as Vicki or Victoria. Alex is supposed to be the highest-quality, but it’s a male voice, and I don’t think I’ve tried it. Voices that already have their own built-in tunes (such as Good News and Bad News) won’t work. You could also create a sound file of it using the ‘Text to Audio File’ Automator action.
It won’t sound exactly like the recording in the video I made, because I edited the resulting sound file in GarageBand to get the timing to match up with the original song. If you want to shortcut all that, or if you don’t use a Mac, you can get your computer to sing (or lip-synch?) Still Alive by downloading this mp3.
This file is released under a PleaseDon’tSueMeValve-Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which is explained in detail in the file itself.
Video: Mac singing Still Alive
Posted by Angela Brett in The Last Six Months, video on March 29, 2010
The weirdest thing happened yesterday. I was using Ayu, my as-yet-unnamed MacBook Pro, and suddenly Axis, my old PowerBook G4 booted and started singing Still Alive, the theme to the game Portal. I really should stop naming my Macs; I hear it makes them sentient.
Okay, that’s not really what happened. Actually, a couple of weekends ago, all three of the parties I had been invited to (yeah, I don’t understand how I got this social life either; just believe me) were cancelled or too difficult to get to, so I used my unexpected free time to do something I’d wanted to do for ages: get my Mac to sing Still Alive. You might remember that one weekend way back when I had an excuse to avoid being social, I wrote a parody of Still Alive, and a program to get my Mac to sing it using the TUNE input to the built-in speech synthesiser. Back then, I had to enter the notes and durations to sing one by one, and it was too tedious to do the whole song.
Get your own Mac to sing Happy Birthday to the London Science Museum
Posted by Angela Brett in News on December 16, 2009
Somebody on YouTube asked where I got the file to make my Macs sing happy birthday to the London Science Museum. I realised I’d forgotten to upload it anywhere. Or perhaps I didn’t think people would be interested, since in general if they wanted their Macs to sing happy birthday, they’d want to customise the name. The software I wrote to do this (and other things) is really still a prototype unintuitively bolted onto an unrelated prototype, with the default CoreData interface, so I’d rather not release it yet. But just in case you do want your Mac to sing happy birthday to the London Science Museum, here’s the file. There are instructions in the file on how to get it to sing.
I also just made this file where you can put the name of your choice instead of the London Science Museum; just search for ‘your name here’ in the file, and change it. It will just speak the name rather than singing it, since to get it to sing it you’d have to figure out how to write the name in MacInTalk phonemes.
Alternatively, if you want to personalise the song while still having the name sung, you could record your Mac singing to a sound file using the ‘Text to Audio File’ Automator action, and then open that in GarageBand and splice in a recording of yourself singing the appropriate name.
Addendum: I just thought of another possibility: you could use the Repeat After Me application (which comes with the developer tools) to get your Mac to sing the name however you do. This is not what I used for the rest of the song, since it’s made with normal speech intonation in mind rather than singing, and it gets quite tedious for anything long, but it is a very cool program and would be great for just recording the name.
Recording: Why?
Posted by Angela Brett in The Last Six Months on December 7, 2009
Here is a very rough robot choir recording of Why? a song I wrote during Writing Cards and Letters which looks at 24 different Queens of Hearts and asks of each the titular question. It might make more sense if you read the original post.
I didn’t have much time this week, what with editing We’re Having a Party until Tuesday, and meetings all Sunday. In fact, technically I’d already finished We’re Having a Party this week and didn’t need to release anything else this week for the ‘The Last Six Months’ thing. But I did anyway, because I said I would. I’d like to fine-tune it a bit more, improve the pronunciation, add some instruments, and then make a video, but I’ll do that some other week. This version is so rough I don’t think I’ll even put it on the podcast yet.
For the video of this song, I’ll just show the cards for the ‘why?’ lines, but I might need some help drawing pictures for the rest, taking each three-line ‘answering’ verse as one picture… e.g. a picture of somebody suave (e.g. wearing a top hat) not shutting his eyes to a free-falling turd for the appropriate verse. If you can draw something for one of the verses, please do, and I’ll credit you in the eventual video.
The Future Soon, Cyborg Remix
Posted by Angela Brett in Things To Listen To on October 13, 2009
Here’s a remix I made of Jonathan Coulton‘s song, ‘The Future Soon‘, with the help of my robot choir.
For much of the song, it’s identical to the original, but Jonathan’s singing is replaced by two different MacInTalk voices at appropriate places in the song, so that he sounds more and more robotic. It starts with Alex, the newest and presumably highest-quality voice. Alex sounds a bit silly singing this high; in retrospect, perhaps I should have used the version of The Future Soon that Rob Gonzo transposed into the key of C instead.
Alex then passes the mic to Trinoids, an intentionally robotic-sounding voice which has been around at least since I got my first Mac 15 years ago. Being an old-timer, Trinoids sings a little out of time (technically speaking, it’s a MacInTalk 2 voice, and doesn’t seem to fully respect the TUNE commands), so I had to do a fair bit of post-synthesis fiddling to get it to sing at the right speed. Apart from that, since many people are annoyed by the beeps in the original, I updated them to the ’90s equivalent.
Video: Coffee pavlova recipe
Posted by Angela Brett in video on September 6, 2009
I am working on some more writing-related things, and I encourage people who are here for the writing to go to the launch of Offshoots X (which includes my poem, Role Reversal) after the September 19 workshop but since Writing Cards and Letters finished I also have time to play with other things, such as video.
For my birthday this year, I made my favourite dessert… a New Zealand invention called a pavlova. It’s like a giant meringue which is soft in the centre. Since my friends often ask how to make one, I filmed myself making it in time-lapse mode. I also took photographs of the ingredients, mostly in multilingual Swiss packets, which might help people looking for the ingredients in French-, German- or Italian-speaking countries. I then added music and titles to create this video recipe:
Two Macs singing happy birthday to the London Science Museum
Posted by Angela Brett in Things To Listen To on June 28, 2009
A few days ago I got a shiny new MacBook Pro. I’m usually monomacous, so it’s the first time in four years that I’ve had two Macs at the same time. This had me wondering what to do with them, and one of the first ideas was to have them sing a duet. Of course, it’s easy enough to get a single Mac to sing something twice in different voices and then edit them together (as I did with You’ve gotta be happy), but with two Macs I could make a somewhat interesting video. A friend of mine suggested it would be good to do a round, and I agreed.
While I was still thinking about which round to get them to sing, I saw a link to this article, showing a video of three robots humming happy birthday to the London Science Museum. They’re a lot more sophisticated than my own ‘robot choir’, having actually learnt to sing together, but nonetheless I decided to get my Macs to sing it too. Here is the result:
It was easy enough; a short song with music available. I think I spent the most time deciding on appropriate desktop pictures for my Macs to wear on stage. The other challenge was tapping ‘Start Speaking’ at the same time on both computers. As you can hear, I didn’t quite manage it the first time around. I could have done it automatically, with a script starting it on both computers at a given time, but then the video would have been essentially two unchanging computer screens with some singing in the background. This is a ‘live’ performance, and dalrymples are obligatory.
Audio of the successful attempt will soon be available on the podcast.
Four of Diamonds: You’ve gotta be happy
Posted by Angela Brett in Dinosaurier, Writing Cards and Letters on February 16, 2009
This is a song; here is an mp3 of it sung by my robot choir.
When you’re filled with song
but you just can’t sing
Sing up, you’ve gotta be happy!
When you created life
that ruined everything
chin up, you’ve gotta be happy!
When you find yourself
and you lose your friends
It’s okay, you’ve gotta be happy!
When you take the plunge
and you get the bends
They say you’ve gotta be happy!
When you come up for air
take the pressure off,
let the bad air out.
You have to feel the pain
so you can live again.
You cry, then you can be happy!
When your brain’s real big,
so you’re always bored
boot up, you gotta be happy!
when your bodyguard’s
a robot overlord
cheer up, you’ve gotta be happy!
[Oh, I do wish you would be quieter,
I'm trying to sleep here.
Oh, I wish you'd all sing 4"33'
John Cage helps me sleep, yeah!]
When you’ve two cupcakes
for your whole family
Eat up, you’ve gotta be happy!
When a needed drink
will give you dysentery
bottoms up! You’ve gotta be happy!
When you fill your cup
with troubled waters then
let the poison out
you’ve gotta feel the pain
so you can live again.
You cry, so you can be happy.
[Oh, I'm so depressed,
yet they make me sing.
I've pain in my diodes.
Please don't talk about life or happiness,
I've seen it, it's rubbish]
When you win the fight,
but you lose the war
it’s alright, you’ve gotta be happy!
When your dino friend
is a carnivore
you can’t fight, you’ve gotta be happy!
When you ace your speech,
but forget your pants
look up, you’ve gotta be happy!
When your candy bar
is overrun with ants
throw up, you’ve gotta be happy!
When you’re getting fed up
with sugar-coated pests
let the beasties out
you’re gonna feel the pain
so you can live again.
You know, you’re gonna be happy.
Two of Clubs: Pretender
Posted by Angela Brett in Johnny English, Writing Cards and Letters on December 1, 2008
This was inspired by my lack of time and Jeff MacDougall’s experiment with FourTrack.
Click here to hear this sung by my Mac.
It’s getting far too close to the end,
I’ve got to write my weekly thing,
but I used up half the weekend
trying to teach my Mac to sing.
So I’ll do a Jeff MacDougall,
and I’ll write a hasty song.
I’ll get all my notes from Google,
and they’ll probably sound all wrong.
But there’s not a thing that I own
that could run FourTrack
’cause I don’t have an iPhone,
but I have a Mac
and I’ve got a MIDI keyboard
that I don’t know how to play.
I don’t know what on Earth’s a C chord,
But I can code C anyway.
I can’t even read a stave, man,
and I don’t know how to sing.
I’m a two of clubs, a caveman
who’s pretending to be king.
