Mechanical piano hacked to talk, says nothing you'd be interested in
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted October 9th 2009 10:07AM
posted October 9th 2009 10:07AM
It's not exactly the Baroque Vocoder we were hoping for, but an Austrian composer has hacked a mechanical piano to recite text -- and recite text it does (even if you need subtitles and some prompting from the voice-over to understand what it's saying). The video itself is a little skint on technical details -- even if the "wow!" factor remains pretty consistent -- but apparently composer Peter Ablinger took a recording of a child reading the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court and converted the frequency spectrum to MIDI, which he was then able to play back using the chordophone pictured above. The gang at Hack A Day seems to think that the actual conversion was done in the Pure Data software package, and who are we to argue? We're just wondering how Black Moth Super Rainbow will ever fit this thing onto their tour van. See for yourself after the break.
[Via Hack A Day]
[Via Hack A Day]
See more video at our hub!
I understand the piano more than the narrator!
This guy should have pitched his idea to a movie company. That would have been a really good special effect to have a possessed piano speaking. :-o
@slappywag that is exactly what i was thinking or put it in a haunted house for Halloween
0.o creepy
yea, Germany can keep their creepy wanna be English talking Piano. bring on the nightmares! fml
It sounds like something out of a scary movie....
@babydill: austria, not germany
still happy to hear something from my home :-D
This piano is like the ultimate in Steam Punk
> This piano is like the ultimate in Steam Punk
- just add steam and punk.
Pretty awesome :)
Agreed! This is absolutely brilliant!
Very spooky - it sounds possessed.
I want to see someone do this with a massive cathedral pipe organ - that would sound awesome.
That would be Keith's organ he's playing with.
Doing this on an organ will summon Lucifer...
This is a fact, I read it on the internet.
Bach, Toccata in D minor, I believe.
@bosco:
i got that!
XD
Gotta use the oldschool Pipe Organs voice on your mac to hear the organs speak.
For all the geeks out there - run this in your AppleScript Editor:
say "[text you want to hear]" using "Pipe Organ"
read this days ago on giz
I seriously wish people started using Closed Captioning instead of annotations for CC on YouTube...
I don't think the major of Youtube viewers are remotely aware that close-captions can be uploaded.
Most youtube uploaders are dumber than a bag of rocks, so don't set the bar too high.
That is awesome! Would be perfect for a haunted house attraction if the actuators were placed under the keys out of view. I'd love to see other implementations of this for other instrument types.
Can you imagine walking into a room with a bunch of instruments on display and suddenly, the instruments start having a conversation with one another. Might even be creepier using "simlish" so you can't understand what it's saying...
One side note... perhaps this kind of thing could be built into traditional instruments as a sort of "trainer" that would watch you play, then instruct you on how to improve it.
Do you feel like I do?
If I feel like you do and you feel like I do, then where are we going to get a monkey for a hat from?
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
No, I’m thinking what I’m thinking.
So, you’re not thinking what I’m thinking?
No, cuz you’re thinking I’m thinking what you’re thinking.
Bob Mayo, on the keyboards. Bob Mayo!
If I was alone with that thing and it started speaking I would actually shit myself....
"We declare that we are all responsible. Educators, Politicians, Social Organizations..." Sounds like the breakdown of of a late 80s/early 90s song. Rock me, Ablingerdeus.
Is "skint" really a word? Isn't it scant?
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/skint
This thing will talk to you and say "Hey there, I will kill you" and it will start moving to you. Then the Boeing's laser will track it down and saves your life.
Just thinking loud ;/
Then you need to start thinging quieter, before they take you away and lock you up.
;-)
I can see someone using this as the voice of an evil computer.
***Thinking**
Time to award it the Nobel Peace Prize
Tough luck, they just gave it to the Blue Power Ranger
Now that's a mod.
It has a German accent.
Like all things evil, this originated in Austria.
It sounds like they could use this as a low resolution speaker. Attach a microphone and let the software convert the sound data into piano ramblings. I was impressed how close it sounded to the kids voice that the recording was based on.
(I also would love to hear a pipe organ version...)
... One day our robot overlords will talk like this.
If they ever make a remake of the movie "Real Genius" (which is pretty much inevitable since that seems what the movie industry likes to do lately), they should replace Kent's tooth radio with a piano like this. A piano yelling at you "And stop playing with yourself!", that's gotta be something that's just as scary and simultaneously funny as the original...
The kid can't even speak properly, which I assume is a major reason why it doesn't sound as good as it can.
They should do one with William Shatner.
I feel sorry for the kid. All his Dad had laying around for him to read was the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court. Isn't that child abuse. Seriously, Thomas Edison's "rendition" of Mary Had a Little Lamb was just too tough to top eh?
That is pretty cool, but I have to add, that is creepy as frak!
this reminds me of "the red queen" in resident evil ...
Seems like an audio version of Captcha