How to Make Your Mac Sing

Macintosh computers have had a built-in speech synthesizer since their introduction in 1984. With a little bit of work it's possible to make your Mac sing.

Step One:

First type in the lyrics that you want the Mac to sing. For this example I've used "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" by the Ramones.

Download the song as an mp3

sheena is a punk rocker,

sheena is a punk rocker,

sheena is a punk rocker, now.

Select the voice that you want to speak your text. I've chosen Junior, Kathy or Fred would also work well.

Highlight the text you want to hear and press Command-J.

Step Two:

OK, that doesn't sound great. In order to really get this to work you have to enter the text phonetically. First we start with a block of commands to the speech synthesizer. These commands are placed between double brackets.

[[pbas 60;rate 160;inpt PHON]]_SIY nAX IXz AX pUXnk rAOkUXr % 

SIY nAX IXz AX pUXnk rAOkUXr %

SIY nAX IXz AX pUXnk rAOkUXr % nAW

The first command, "pbas" refers to the base note at which the speech is spoken, the second, "rate" is how quickly it's spoken, and "inpt PHON" tells the synthesizer to expect speech which is spelled phonetically.

Here is a list of the phonemes and some other commands.

Step Three:

Well, that sounds a little better, but now the real work starts. You need to add a "pbas" command wherever the pitch changes and try to correct the phrasing by fiddling with the "rate", by using the < and > symbols which shorten and lengthen syllables and by adding "slnc" commands to insert pauses.

[[pbas 60;rate 160;inpt PHON]]_S>>IY nAX [[slnc 200]]~>IXz

[[slnc 800]]~AX pUXnk ~rAOk[[pbas 62]]~UXr% 

[[pbas 64;rate 120]]_S>IY[[pbas 62]]~>IY[[pbas 60]]~n>AX [[pbas 62]]~AX          

[[pbas 60]]_IXz [[slnc 300]]~AX [[pbas 65]]~pUXnk 

[[pbas 59]]~rAO[[pbas 62]]~kUXr% 

[[pbas 60;rate 160]]_S>>IY nAX [[slnc 200]]~>IXz @ 

[[slnc 300;rate 140]]AX pUXnk rAOk[[pbas 62]]~UXr @ 

[[pbas 64]]~nAX[[pbas 62]]~AW[[pbas 60]]~AW[[pbas 62]]~AW[[pbas 60]]~AW

That's it. Now put it together with a little background music and you're all set.

More:

Check out what the whole text file looks like.

(Further note: I was kind of misleading as there are a couple more steps, basically you may want to chop up all the words into little bits and play them back from a sampler, it's a lot easier than messing with the [[slnc n]] command for days on end.)