Roger Ebert gets his voice backrogerebert.suntimes.com
Well, kind of, thanks to a company that custom builds text-to-speech voices. Ebert’s new voice is compiled from his vast accumulated archive of reviews and commentary tracks.
CereProc didn’t need to hear me speaking a specific word in order for my “voice” to say it. They needed lots of words to determine the general idea of how I might say a word. They transcribed and programmed and tweaked and fiddled, and early this February, sent me the files for a beta version of my voice. I played it for Chaz, and she said, yes, she could tell it was me. For one thing it knew exactly how I said “I.”
CereProc is now blending in my audio snippets for “Casablanca,” where I sound enthusiastic, and “Floating Weeds,” where I sound calm and respectful. It’s nice to think of all these great movies sloshing around and coming out as my voice.
The Mac startup sound and Sosumi
A great interview with the former head sound guy at Apple. The intro is in Dutch but the interview itself continues in English.
A gentleman in the comments with a NSFW user icon offers this bit of HTML geekery:
If you look at the Apple’s website source code, the element containing their copyright notice it’s actually called “sosumi”
Link via John Gruber
A brief homage to Franklin Gothicwww.moma.org
Franklin Gothic is the basis of MoMA’s typographic identity. August Hefner found some examples of Franklin Gothic being used at the museum dating back to the 1930s. One of the signs reads:
The public is urgently requested to visit the Galleries in the morning, from 10 to 12 and evening from 8 to 10 in order to avoid congesting the elevator service. If this request is complied with, it will not be necessary to charge admission.
I didn’t realize that the museum’s adaptation of the typeface, MoMA Gothic, was created by the same type designer as the original.
Reading J.D. Salinger under Antarctica
A few days ago I linked to an article on Gareth Long’s lenticular interpretations of 90s era J.D. Salinger book covers.
Due to the visual effect of viewing these from different angles, video does better justice to the works than a sequence of photos. Helpfully, Gareth Long provides such videos on his website. I’ve taken these and, with permission from the artist, edited them into a single clip. I also added a sound track, field recordings taken below Antarctic ice shelfs. The two seemed to fit somehow.
Our game-permeated futureg4tv.com
Jesse Schell is a professor at CMU who gave a presentation recently on games and their relationship to culture. The tone changes a lot toward the end of the presentation with a surprise (to me) ending. I disagree with his conclusion, but I’ll leave that for a future post.
Events for February 24-28, 2010
In no particular order:
- NURTUREart’s Muse Fest is happening tonight in Williamsburg
- There’s a whole lot of stuff happening tomorrow night, but I’m sticking to my Trade School plans (still 2 seats left!)
- Which unfortunately means I’ll be missing Hype Machine’s CD-Swap (assigned to my Multimedia 1 class as extra credit)
- Andrew Schneider’s WOW+FLUTTER runs Thursday until Saturday at the Chocolate Factory
- My friend Kylie has a video/performance at P.S.1 on Saturday
Chinese ethnic minority theme parkswww.nytimes.com
Ethnic Han make up 96% of China’s population according to official statistics. Other ethnic groups might be found performing in an ethnic theme park.
The most famous park, the Nationalities Park in Beijing, is a combination of museum and fairground. Ethnic workers from across China dress up in their native costumes for mostly Han tourists. (For a while, English signs there read “Racist Park,” an unfortunate translation of the Chinese name.) In some parks, Han workers dress up as natives — a practice given legitimacy by the Chinese government when Han children marched out in the costumes of the 55 minorities during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Having just seen a play recently on the history of Minstrel shows, it’s hard to be too judgmental.
In the Dogg Houseonline.wsj.com
I admit it, I’m only linking this so you get to see Snoop Dogg get the Wall Street Journal stipple portrait treatment.
Link
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