instrument-a-day 7: speak and play!


(link to video)

Speak and Play! is a speech synthesizer for pianists. It has two parts: a score generator that turns written English text into musical scores, and a sample set (hurriedly constructed from my own voice) which, when used to play the scores, approximately recreates the original text.

Thanks to pianist Margaret Leng Tan for making Speak and Play! speak and play, and for coming up with the name!

More details below…
Continue reading

instrument-a-day 5: brass free reeds


Primitive accordion-style free reeds, made from basswood and strips of brass. They take a LOT of wind to play – I almost passed out while recording the soundtrack. I also broke one of them, so I tapped and scraped on the reed instead of blowing it.

They have a nice deep tone with a lot of promise, so I hope to work with this technique more. I used this reference while building them.

I didn’t manage to record any video, so the demo video is pretty bland.