Would this be a good way to learn a language? Seems like a good way to show how to pronounce consonants/vowels that we may have trouble discerning from similar sounds.
You can make most pulmonic voiced consonants, except laterals, trills, dentals, and retroflexes, so /m n ɲ ŋ ɴ b d ɟ g ɢ ʡ ʔ ɣ z ʒ ʑ β ʋ ɹ j ɰ ʁ ʕ ɦ ⱱ ɾ/ are all possible, as well as all vowels. If you're really quick with your mouse you can then make pretty decent sounding words using any of these sounds. Some relatively easy ones I managed to do are "man", "no", "guy", "me", and "why".
Some require co-articulation and diphthongs. For example, "why" requires putting the tongue to the top left, /ɯ/, rounding the lips, making it /u/, then quickly releasing the lips and moving the tongue to the bottom/bottom-right, /a/, then sliding it to the top right, /i/, so that you end up with /uai/ which is pretty close to the correct English /waɪ/.
Love the tie in with physical science / diagram. Not over the top trying to be sterile perfect, more a beautiful tool to deliver "conceptual" perspective. Interactions. So very very cool.
As somebody else noted, wisely so, I'd love this as a free VST DLL. Could fit right in over at KVR Audio.
I've done a C port of this code and hooked it up to my own midi controller. Much fun. Happy to share the code with anyone who wants it.
Funnily enough, the port I did was so brainless that the last bit (the perlin noise part) was originally in C, then ported by HN's very own josephg. I didn't notice this, even though Joseph was a friend of mine at uni. Once I finished the port and went to making sure all the licensing stuff was fine I noticed this all.
How difficult would it be to wrap your code in VSTi plug-in and produce a DLL? This would make it easy to hook up to midi controller and other devices using any realtime VST-capable host.
I prefer LV2 plugins as they integrate nicely into the rest of system. As I dabble in sound/music only rarely, Jack's all-or-nothing approach doesn't suit me at all. Also, it requires 5+ windows just to set everything up.
Super cool. Is there a gender button somewhere? sounds very male to me but there's no difference in voice/sound production between genders other than just the exact pitch, right? Can you get it to make sounds like a woman or only a man?
There is (typically) a difference other than pitch. Formants will be in slightly different locations [1]; the energy in the spectrum is balanced differently; there is more aspiration noise [2]. You can model the latter somewhat with this tool by moving the voice source box down.
I've been creating a speech synthesiser recently and it does seem like simple approaches produce a voice that is more passably 'male' than 'female', even accounting for the pitch. Aspiration added with white noise sounds better but doesn't quite get that breathy quality across. I think more sophisticated techniques may be needed.
It would be neat if this took some kind of data input in sequence to manipulate the pieces. It would be neat to decode Speex or Codec 2 data as input into this to watch the animation ....
Also, if you like this kind of interactive thingies, you might enjoy the explorables subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/explorables/