Music — No comments
30
Mar 10

Level 17

Here’s a fresh tune I did this morning, I hope you like it.

tobiah - level 17
Music videos — No comments
29
Mar 10

I love your music (music video)

This track represent the first breakthrough I made on the chip music scene. It was originally only 1:28 minute long. (The part when a speech synthesis sings was added later.) It was made as a demonstration song for my brother (Daniel Viksporre) and his MIDI sync device that he made and sold for the Game Boy and LSDJ music software. This was back in 2001 i think.

Later a music radio station in London (I don’t remember which) had downloaded this demo song and had played it several times and emailed me if I had a longer version. That was when I decided to build the longer version that is released on micromusic.net

The first music video on this page was directed by E*Rock of Wyld File. www.wyldfile.org Who also directed a video for Beck. The second was made by me (Tobiah) as an introduction for the CD compilation “Boy Playground” which the track was released on.

Uncategorized — 3 comments
29
Mar 10

How to make OS X sing

Here we go, my first post on this fresh blog.

Here is the result of an experiment that I did. The first chorus is with vocoder and the second without for comparison.

tobiah - even machines

This is what I used to make the track. This not an absolute, other set-ups works as well but with different methods.

  • OS X Snow Leopard (For speechsynthesis and OS)
  • Ableton Live 8
  • Chipsounds (For the C64 lead and Carrier on the Vocoder)
  • MicroTonic (Drum synthesizer)
  • Synplant (Pads and Bass)

In the Terminal application, write the following:

say “I am the robot”

This makes OS X’s synthesis to speak out loud, but if you add the following, it will write the audio to a file with the name you specify. (I used the file ending *.aac because it was the only format I got to work)

say -o “audiofile.aac” “I am the robot”

Now you can make short samples of synthesized speech that you can include in your music projects.

What I did after that was to import the speech into Audacity and convert it to AIFF format so that I could import it into Live 8. In Live 8 you have a function to stretch and beatmatch transients. So it doesn’t matter so much that the output from the OS X speech synthesis isn’t made for musicmaking.

A general tip about vocoders that I picked up from Kraftwerk, is that if you use an EQ on the voice (modulator) and add gain to the higher portion of the audio frequency range. You will get a much clearer sound.