IVO Software, a Polish company that develops text-to-speech software, have announced they’re making a free PDF of A Christmas Carol available for download on their site. The idea is, you take this PDF, then unleash their Expressivo text-to-speech tool on it. Sure, every actor from Patrick Stewart to Jim Dale to … well, just about anybody who’s anybody with an English accent has read the story. But now you get it in the somewhat robotic monotone of “Jennifer”, an American, synthesized voice. Jennifer has won awards and rave review, but let’s just say computer-generated speech in general can’t help pass a Turing Test yet.

If you’ve been hankering for a little artificial speech in your holiday, though, don’t pass this up. In fact, if you want to hear Dickens’ words completely mangled, try Polish and Romanian voices on the English text. And you thought you would never hear A Christmas Carol in a new light. Dickens as you’ve never heard it before.

Free sample passage of the text
Expressivo Download Area
PDF repository, direct download of “A Christmas Carol”

For more holiday cheer:
Christmas Carol Mondegreens, which is what happens when you mis-hear lyrics. (Think: “See the blazing Yulbie Forest” and various things roasting on an open fire.)

If you didn’t see it last year, there’s always — through the magic of digital sampling — the Nutcracker Suite played entirely on bicycle parts.

And lastly, from the CDM forums, a very Happified Wintricated Holidation to all. Now let’s get celebratronic, at least until we make up our own holidays.

Maybe it’s something about music making in the digital age, the alienation of music technology. Or maybe there’s just something fun about mechanical objects making sound on their own. Whatever it is, artists lately have been fascinated by mechanical instruments. Here’s yet another one:

French artist Saadane Afif makes sometimes-chilly installations out of musical objects, like a minimalist collection of guitars and amps, strummed by mechanical apparatus, in his piece Power Chords. Or, in art world-speak, he…

…works with notions of displacement and contrast. His pieces, vibrating with multiple meanings, function by using collusion as their driving force. He employs objects, scale models, installations, sounds, and writing to classify the unclassifiable and mirror-in the work of art itself – the dialog that arises between the viewer and the artist. This dialog is continuously fueled by various allusions and is infiltrated on every side by historic, psychological, social, and cultural elements.

It always has to be about displacement, doesn’t it? Always has to be the dialog between viewer and event? Darned art writers.

Anyway, in plain English he puts 13 guitars in a room and they play mysterious, ethereal strumming sounds as you walk through, a bit like a minimalist haunted Guitar Center.

It’s not just the guitars: he’s made his other work into musical installation. Lyrics is a radically different take on the artist retrospective: the artist is gone, and instead digital music reinterpreting his work takes its place. Lyrics are printed in bold Helvetica on the walls, and commissioned texts are reinterpreted by commissioned composers, as colored lights lead the audience around to headphones.

Good stuff, and fertile ground for those imagining new venues for music. Now, excuse me; my phone is vibrating with multiple meanings.

Gelerie Michel Rein on Exhibition
Power Chords, monograph
Seen in the lovely Artkrush 63