[mary-dev] Art/Technology residency in Spain, question/proposal

[Ingmar Steiner]

Dear Jaume,

thank you very much for your message!

I think that it's absolutely feasible to record and build a TTS voice in 
two months; in fact we do it in two weeks as a project seminar at 
Saarland University (next one coming up in February).

Moreover, we are working on several projects with a growing group of 
people, and part of this involves a complete overhaul of the 
voicebuilding process; our development code is already working, and is 
expected to become more stable in the next few weeks. So it's a great 
time to become involved in MaryTTS, as the dev community is 
significantly larger and more active than it was in the not-too-distant 
past.

One thing to keep in mind for your project, however, is that the Spanish 
language components are still rather basic (and not even merged into the 
upstream/master branch yet); so if you plan on building a Spanish voice, 
some further improvements to the NLP code work might be required ahead 
of time to improve the subsequent TTS enabled by your voice.

Best wishes,

-Ingmar

On 21.01.15 14:14, Jaume Ferrete wrote:
> Dear,
>
> This is an email related to developing a voice for MARY, as part of an
> artistic residency and production grant. I kindly ask for the lists
> oppinion on the feasibility of the project, and the possible involvement
> or support of MARY TTS devs, as a collective or individually.
>
> I work as an artist, based in Barcelona, and I've been working for a few
> years on the subject of the voice. I have been in residency, worked and
> exhibited internationally, including at Museum of Contemporary Art of
> Barcelona, District Berlin, Helsinki International Artists in Residency
> Program, Urban Video Project (New York), Matadero (Madrid), Vessel
> (Bari, Italy), Secession (Viena), and other venues. I am also part of
> "Sons de Barcelona <http://barcelona.freesound.org/>" a sound pedagogy
> project initiated by the Music Technology Group of Pompeu Fabra
> University (MTG/UPF) and related to project Freesound
> <http://freesound.org>.
>
> I am at the moment preparing a submission that involves MARYTTS for a
> grant at LABoral <http://laboralcentrodearte.org/> ; an art and
> technology related institution in Gijón, Spain. F
>
> I would like to develop a MARY TTS voice, exploring and expanding on the
> process; documenting its different phases, paying attention to its
> aesthetic and ideological implications, and putting them in context;
> including its historical context regarding the reproduction of the human
> voice.
>
> As I understand it, the process requires a professional team and proper
> recording equipment. The grant is a two month residency, with a budget
> of +- 8000€, and involves a final exhibition.
>
> As I do not have experience in the concrete process I am not sure if the
> time is feasible, and if the budget would allow me to pay for the worrk
> of the professionals that I need to develop the voice.
>
> It would be very helpful for me if you could give me your opinion on its
> feasibility regarding the voice production process; and maybe if MARY's
> devs would be interested in collaborating or supporting a project like
> this in any manner.
>
> Thank you very much for taking the time to read this email, and your help.
>
> All the best,
> Jaume
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mary-dev mailing list
> Mary-dev at dfki.de
> http://www.dfki.de/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/mary-dev
>

-- 
/**
  * Dr. Ingmar Steiner
  *
  * Head of Independent Research Group
  * Multimodal Speech Processing
  * Cluster of Excellence MMCI
  *
  * Senior Researcher
  * Language Technology Lab
  * German Research Center for
  * Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH)
  *
  * Principal Investigator
  * Collaborative Research Center SFB-1102
  * Information Density and Linguistic Encoding
  *
  * Department of Computer Science
  * Department of Computational Linguistics & Phonetics
  * Saarland University
  *
  * Campus C7.4, Room 2.01
  * D-66123 Saarbrücken
  * @tel: +49-681-302-70028
  * @fax: +49-681-302-4317
  * @web: http://coli.uni-saarland.de/~steiner/
  */