Saw this on TV a few days ago and just remembered about it: the talking piano, a mechanical piano modified to play voice recordings. Granted, it’s not especially high fidelity, but I wouldn’t have thought it possible at all.
Not sure if this is the right place to put it, one could certainly see a degree of mundane pointlessness in this, but it’s played on a piano after all…
It’s neat, but it’s also quite monotone, and would be quite creepy in the right setting. And I’m reading it just before bed!
It’s a piano run through a vocoder. Really any sound source could be used.
It took me a bit, but I think I understand what you are saying. What they did was run the kid’s reading through a vocoder, rounding the formants to the closest piano note frequencies, and used that data to play notes on a device similar to a nickelodeon or player piano.
I already knew that was what the experiment did. What I didn’t know was that was how a vocoder worked. I thought they just sped up or slowed down the pitches of the voice to match the note played.
Doesn’t a vocoder usually work the other way round, though – taking an instrument’s sound as carrier, modulating it with a voice input? This decomposes the voice recording, and mechanically plays it on an otherwise unaltered piano – perhaps nothing terribly challenging, engineering wise, but an original idea nevertheless.
Clearly, the piano has been drinking.
Can you imagine being awakened by that at 3am. I’m out the window!