The Future Soon, Cyborg Remix

Here’s a remix I made of Jonathan Coulton’s song, ‘The Future Soon’. For much of the song, it’s identical to the original, but Jonathan’s singing is replaced by two different Mac voices at appropriate places in the song, so that he sounds more and more robotic. It starts with Alex, the most recent, and presumably most high-quality, voice. Alex sounds a bit silly singing this high; in retrospect, perhaps I should have used ‘The Future Soon in C’ instead. This changes to Trinoids, an intentionally robotic-sounding voice which has been around at least since I got my first Mac 15 years ago. Being an older voice, Trinoids sings a little out of time, so I had to do a fair bit of fiddling to get it to sing at the right speed.

Last December, Spektagulo released UltraStar files for 25 Jonathan Coulton songs. UltraStar is a karaoke game similar to SingStar, and the song files for it give lyrics and the notes and timing that you’re supposed to sing them with. I pretty much immediately recognized these as a potential input for my robot choir, and soon afterwards had my robots singing along to UltraStar files reasonably well. I was still puzzled by part of the format, though, and couldn’t get UltraStar to run on my PowerBook in order to experiment with the song editor. I could get it to sing the songs recognizably, but the pauses between lines were all wrong. So I let it go for a while.

Now I have a MacBook Pro which can run both UltraStar and UltraStar deluxe, and I found some actual documentation on the UltraStar file format. I was at a LAN party last weekend, so I had the whole night to do whatever I felt like on my Mac, and this is what I felt like doing. The documentation basically told me I could ignore the extra numbers that were confusing me, but whichever way I looked at it, the pauses between lines were about twice as long as they should have been. I ended up concluding that UltraStar must interpret the timing differently when there’s no singing, and resigned myself to adjusting the timing manually. Not a problem: I had all night.

Here’s a remix I made of Jonathan Coulton’s song, ‘The Future Soon‘, with the help of my robot choir.

For much of the song, it’s identical to the original, but Jonathan’s singing is replaced by two different MacInTalk voices at appropriate places in the song, so that he sounds more and more robotic. It starts with Alex, the newest and presumably highest-quality voice. Alex sounds a bit silly singing this high; in retrospect, perhaps I should have used the version of The Future Soon that Rob Gonzo transposed into the key of C instead.

Alex then passes the mic to Trinoids, an intentionally robotic-sounding voice which has been around at least since I got my first Mac 15 years ago. Being an old-timer, Trinoids sings a little out of time (technically speaking, it’s a MacInTalk 2 voice, and doesn’t seem to fully respect the TUNE commands), so I had to do a fair bit of post-synthesis fiddling to get it to sing at the right speed. Apart from that, since many people are annoyed by the beeps in the original, I updated them to the ’90s equivalent.

Two Macs singing happy birthday to the London Science Museum

A few days ago I got a shiny new MacBook Pro. I’m usually monomacous, so it’s the first time in four years that I’ve had two Macs at the same time. This had me wondering what to do with them, and one of the first ideas was to have them sing a duet. Of course, it’s easy enough to get a single Mac to sing something twice in different voices and then edit them together (as I did with You’ve gotta be happy), but with two Macs I could make a somewhat interesting video. A friend of mine suggested it would be good to do a round, and I agreed.

While I was still thinking about which round to get them to sing, I saw a link to this article, showing a video of three robots humming happy birthday to the London Science Museum. They’re a lot more sophisticated than my own ‘robot choir’, having actually learnt to sing together, but nonetheless I decided to get my Macs to sing it too. Here is the result:

It was easy enough; a short song with music available. I think I spent the most time deciding on appropriate desktop pictures for my Macs to wear on stage. The other challenge was tapping ‘Start Speaking’ at the same time on both computers. As you can hear, I didn’t quite manage it the first time around. I could have done it automatically, with a script starting it on both computers at a given time, but then the video would have been essentially two unchanging computer screens with some singing in the background. This is a ‘live’ performance, and dalrymples are obligatory.

Audio of the successful attempt will soon be available on the podcast.