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Speaking Piano - Now with (somewhat decent) captions!

TheMcphearson · 2.2M views · 2009-10-05 · 2:41

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Overview

A player piano is made to reproduce human speech, here reciting a European Environmental Criminal Court proclamation in German at the 2009 World Venice Forum. This upload adds subtitles so the words become understandable.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as the canonical talking-piano example, uncanny and impressive once you read the captions.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2010–2023

Topics

Music performance & songsComputer vision, speech & NLPMagic, puzzles & curiosities
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talking pianospeech synthesisauditory perceptionplayer pianomusic

What people said

gizajob · 2023-08 · Recommendation

It's the Shepard tone effect running in the background of the actual notes, which produce a mild illusion that they're ascending when they're not, but nevertheless they're moving up and then down in pitches so it's not a brilliant example. I think the author is a little confused in this short essay about a few things. His "talking piano" effect is just standard vocoding, which has made me think this is all fairly new to him and he's not an expert. THIS is a talking piano: [VIDEO]

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ssfrr · 2020-05 · Recommendation

I love this demo. It’s a good example of how much our perception is affected by our priors. This is a other great example, where speech is synthesized with an acoustic piano (though the keys are controlled digitally, the sound is just from the hammers and strings). Without the subtitles you probably couldn’t understand, but it sounds pretty clear when you know what it’s saying already. [VIDEO]

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jacquesm · 2015-03 · Recommendation

A loudspeaker is nothing but a coil, a magnet and a piece of cardboard and it too is capable of incredible tonal quality and a huge range of polyphonics. This one really got me: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by TheMcphearson, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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