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From: gus@Shasta.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.music,net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Kate Bush and gender id (Really Fairlight CMI)
Message-ID: <5557@Shasta.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 20-May-85 04:48:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: Shasta.5557
Posted: Mon May 20 04:48:12 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 23-May-85 03:34:35 EDT
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> This reminds me of a question that has been bothering me for a long time.
> Back when the Apple* Macintosh** personal computer first came out, there
> was a demo disk distributed to various dealers, etc., of a voice synthesis
> program [it's the one that had different names over the early part of the
> product life, names like MacinTalk, MacTalk, etc., and I don't know the
> name it has now or had then].  Included with it was a little demo that
> recited the well-known "In the olden days, before 1984, not many people
> used computers, and for a very good reason: not many knew how, and..."
> story.

The name of the program was indeed Macintalk. It fell into obscurity
after last spring when it first released, was re-released (with better
sound) in December to a few developers, including myself, and is now
on the verge of falling into obscurity again. I really hope that Apple
finally finishes off the contract work on this thing and releases it
completely.

Macintalk was written by the same people who wrote SAM (Software Automated
Mouth) for the Atari and Apple II. They were commissioned early on by Apple
to do a Mac port, and it appeared in the original Mac demo in January, '84
(on a 512K Mac!) Over the past year, I have been able to collect bits
and pieces of old Macintalk junk including the Mac/Fairlight script
mentioned earlier. The New (December '84) Macintalk sound a lot better.
It sounds like a a computer in its mid 30's rather than an old man who's
false teeth are out for repair.

I had the opportunity to do a fair amount of Macintalk hacking this winter
when I wrote ShuttleClock, a timeline reminder clock to remind experimenters
on the ground of various events occurring in Spacelab 2 to go up in
the Space shuttle this summer. 

There are two modules - Macintalk and Reciter. Macintalk goes phoneme to
speech, and Reciter goes from text to phonemes. Since I had to do text
to speech, and the timelines I was reading had a lot of strange vocabulary,
I had to disassemble the entire reciter code in order to get at the text-
to-phoneme rules table. (They promised to have this available in the
next release, but I couldn't wait...)

I found that I had to do a lot of tuning to get words to sound right, and
I added a lot more words than I thought I would have to, but the result
is a very nice sounding program which, I hope, will do its job well.