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.

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Some readers on this site — wisely, perhaps — cautioned last year against doing a second "Create Digital …" site for interactive visuals, live visuals, and VJing. But to us, the connection between musical performance and technology and visual performance and technology is really essential. I’m pleased to announce that now, following a two-week sojourn on the Australian content, we’re finally kicking createdigitalmotion.com into high gear and lining up what we want the mature site to be. If you haven’t been reading lately, here’s a bit of what you’ve missed:

• Video scratching with Serato: At long last, one of the leaders in digital control vinyl has added video scratching as well as audio via a new plug-in called VIDEO-SL, now in beta; we’re planning our own test but already have one hands-on.
• We’ve got a big list of video and visual goodies we like. Is it a practical holiday shopping guide? Erm … bits of it are. It’s all drool-worthy, at least. And you’ll really want vintage, gigantic planetarium projections. Lay out some cots, and play that four hour ambient electronic set you’ve been working up.
• Want to learn this stuff yourself? vade has some nice online workshops and tutorials for working with visuals in Pure Data (Pd) and Processing. Both also work well for music, so if you want to dabble in custom-programmed audiovisuals (I swear, anyone can do it with some dedication!) this could be a good place to start. We’ve also got tips for inexpensive high-speed photography and not one but two CDMo tutorials on the free Quartz Composer tool in OS X Tiger and Leopard. See Keith’s report on what’s new in the Leopard release of Quartz Composer, plus a beginner-friendly tutorial for driving 3D cubes with audio courtesy VJ Kung Fu’s momo the monster. The latter should be ideal for whipping up some quick sound-driven visuals for your band; you can even host those visuals in the live music host Rax. Incidentally, our CDMo New Years’ Resolution: make more work, post more tutorials.
• Open jamming for visualists: Just as with music, the best way to practice your chops and share your work is to get out of your bedroom/studio and out to an open jam. We’ve got a full report on the Perth, Australia Plug and Play, an ideal example of how such an event could work, as part of their Byte Me! Festival I attended earlier this month. See the video below, and watch for more video soon - Jaymis and I are editing hours of video footage now.

Plug N Play - ByteMe Festival - Perth from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

If you want to keep up-to-date on Create Digital Motion, you can add the feeds for the site:

RSS Feed (or subscribe via email)

Create Digital Motion Flickr pool

We’re also posting weekend inspiration each week, back next weekend post-holiday break.

From the whole CDM team, very happy holidays. (Yep, New Year’s Eve is among them — we’ll be cracking on 2007-in-review!)

CDM, features, free, holiday, laptop performance, Mac, quartz composer, Scratch, Serato, tips, tutorials, vinyl, visualist, VJ, Web

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One half of a promo mix for STACKIN PAPER 3: Wrappin Paper, at Belvederes in Pittsburgh on Dec 28th. Mashed up selection of Electro Crunk, Rave Bass, and Bmore Bashment. Tracklisting: Born With It & Bob - Stack My Paper Up / Trillville vs The Knife - Some Cut Like A Knife (ABX mashup) / Annie Lennox & Paper Planes (b.cause party break) / M.I.A. - Paper Planes (Bun B Verse only) / Mia vs Lil Jon vs Ciara - Me & U Throwing Paper Planes (Kimarr edit) / The Futureheads - Worry About It Later (Switch Remix Edit) / Dre Skull - I Want You Back / Kanye West - Stronger (Atrak remix) / Thunderheist - Suenos Dolces / Fugees - Ready Or Not (Drop the Lime Slime You Refix) / Philadelphyinz - Pittsburgh Club Anthem / Mason Vs Wideboys - Girls Dem Exceeder / Timbaland - Miscommunication (The Bloody Beetroots Remix) / David Sugar - Oi New York This is London / Snowden - Black Eyes (Le Castle Vania Remix) / Warp Bros - Do It / Kid Sister - Pro Nails (Bag Raiders remix) / DJ Inferno - Out of My Head / DJ Khaled f. T-Pain, Trick Daddy, & Rick Ross - I’m So Hood (Murderbot Remix) / contact: paperstackers@gmail.com - Source Site:http://hauntedshit.com/events/stackinpaper3/

So this is it for us. It's time to wrap things up for a while and take that well-deserved holiday break. Let's shut down computers, turn off CD players, iPods and turntables and spend some quality time with family and friends. Have a peaceful time filled with all the joys of the season and see you all in 2008!

"A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to the world!" —Charles Dickens

Photo credit: Splat Worldwide, via Flickr.

Happy Christmas from EP! - to help with the festivities we've mixed you a selection of electronic music by Brian N Tuley, Jeff Woodall, Foreign System, My Electronic Things, Lobo Halcyon & Blue Stone Jones - for track listings and information, www.electronicperiodic.com 1. Gad Hifi - Brian N Tuley. 2. The Miracle of Water - Jeff Woodall. 3. Permafrost - Foreign System. 4. Matrix - My Electronic Things. 5. Colours - Lobo Halcyon. 6. Farm Funk - Blue Stone Jones.

I’ve always been fascinated with the evolution of species. Ever seen those bizarre, short-lived organisms in textbooks, the ones that look like they have twelve eyes and a hundred really tall legs and a spindly tail that serves no purpose? I feel the same way about new instruments, interfaces, and music software. Sometimes it’s the evolutionary aberrations — whether practical or not — that are the most interesting, and that perhaps tell us the most about the more dominant species. (Hello, guitars.) And with an open door policy for DIY instruments, we’ve seen some wonderfully unusual experiments at the Handmade Music event series along just these lines.

Continuing our performance series, with assistance from Make Magazine and Etsy.com, we had some special guests last Sunday at openhousegallery in SoHo, New York: the Mister Resistor Ensemble. Headed by Ranjit Bhatnagar, the inventive sound artist who brought us robotic Theremins and MIDI ironing boards, this group of students from Parsons is lucky enough to spend a whole semester building fun instruments with hardware and software. The results are clearly experimental, but that’s the point. Some informal video clips:

Handmade Music: Mister Resistor from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

(...)
Read the rest of Crazy Handmade Musical Creations from the Mister Resistor Ensemble (524 words)

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Artist/producer Morgan King writes us to say a couple of electronic music outlets are evidently no more. For his part, Morgan is working on getting more music available in his own project, Accidental Music — more on that soon. (And some of you may know Morgan from projects like Clubland, or the fact that he won a Swedish Grammy — they’re tasty with lingonberries, believe me.) React Music / Resist Music was a label close to him personally. He writes:

I am sad to report on the demise of Resist Music, who I have personally had dealings with for the last thirteen years!

Resist Music actually started out in 1990 known then as React Music and they came to prominence with the release of the first three volumes of the seminal “Café Del Mar” Compilation, Mrs Wood and the Reactivate series to name a few.

In 2004 React Music was forced into voluntary administration following the closure of the Beechwood Music group which owed React in excess of £1.000.000 and it was at this point they bounced back in the guise of Resist Music the same year!

In November this year (2007) I was waiting for my royalty payment and in the past Resist we’re always prompt at making payments, so it came as a surprise to me when after an enquiry about monies due to me I had no response and when I tried to call the phone had been disconnected.

A few days’ later I emailed an employee who I knew personally and this was the response:

Hi Morgan

Very bad news I’m afraid.  I was made redundant last Friday which is what it says in the letter I received this morning, apparently at that time Resist went into Liquidation.

The Liquidators are David Rubin & Partners, Pearl Assurance House, 319 Ballards Lane, London N12 8LY.

I know that Music Industry sales have really been suffering at the hands of modern technology so I’m afraid it hasn’t come as a surprise.

At the time of writing this I am waiting for the liquidators to get back to me and the Resist Website still seems to be in operation although every other activity of the company has ceased!

In the following week I heard that 3Beat Digital and Amato distribution had also folded: 3beat Digital

I wish James and Melissa all the best in the future and would like to say a personal thanks for the years of hard work they put in to the Music Business.

3Beat Digital is notable in that they, like dancetracksdigital, offered pre-warped Ableton Live-ready tracks; they were more or less the UK-based alternative. (I wrote about the two services for Computer Music a while ago.) This leaves DTD, from what I can tell; 3Beat has only a dance blog where the store had been. Any other distributors MIA, let us know.

Ableton Live, distribution, industry, labels, music, online, Web

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- James Wignall concludes in his blog post today over at Guardian that vinyl records bundled with a free digital downloads offer the best of all possible worlds:

"It's hardly fair to criticise record labels (especially indies) for focusing on cost-efficiency in manufacturing CDs, but in a climate where illegal downloading is rife, the MP3-vinyl could provide an answer. [...] It's a long shot, but if all record companies, including the majors, adopt the digital-vinyl format, then vinyl could stop being arcane and curious, and be restored to its rightful position as the people's choice."

- Gridface lists his top albums, singles and EPs of 2007. "For me, 2007 was a period of transition, from IDM back to techno and from CDs to vinyl and downloads." Very nice selection!

- Thom Yorke and David Byrne talk music business in December '07 issue of Wired.

- Mixmag finally declares that DJing is no longer enough. Good morning.

Image by Pheek via Philip Sherburne.