
MUSA (MUltichannel Speaking Automaton) was an early prototype of
Speech Synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...
machine started in 1975.
Description
It consisted of a stand-alone computer hardware and a specialized software that implemented a
diphone
In phonetics, a diphone is an adjacent pair of phones in an utterance. For example, in aɪfəʊn the diphones are a ɪ �f ə �ʊ �n The term is usually used to refer to a recording of the transition between two phones.
In the following di ...
-synthesis technology. It was one of the first real-time TTS systems. It was able to read Italian in intellegibile robotic voice and also to sing managing up to 8 synthesis channels in parallel thanks to
Linear predictive coding
Linear predictive coding (LPC) is a method used mostly in audio signal processing and speech processing for representing the spectral envelope of a digital signal of speech in compressed form, using the information of a linear predictive mo ...
technology. In 1978 it was released, after the building of a working prototype, a
45" rpm audio disk containing some trial content of such synthesis, including the song ''"
Fra Martino Campanaro"'' in "
a cappella" (multiple voices) style, attached to some commercial reviews.
The experiment was conducted by
CSELT
Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni (CSELT) was an Italian research center for telecommunication based in Torino, the biggest in Italy and one of the most important in Europe. It played a major role internationally especially in the stand ...
,
Turin
Turin ( , Piedmontese: ; it, Torino ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in Northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. Th ...
,
Italy
Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
and was led by
Giulio Modena.
Related pages
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Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...
*
Eloquens (software)
Notes
References
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External links
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* {{cite web , url= https://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0607-loquendo-speech/Baggia_Trento_2006_sml.pdf, title= W3C: Speech Technologies and Standards - DIT Seminars, Povo, Trento., last= Baggia, first= Paolo, date= 2006, website= W3C, publisher= , access-date= June 22, 2022, language=it
Applications of artificial intelligence
Computational linguistics
History of human–computer interaction