Shot originally as a time-lapse test, Cloud was given the aural treatment by Tobiah and now has the artistic cred to stand as a work of it’s own.

Go to http://www.vimeo.com/13966068 for the original video

This is what I used to make the track. This not an absolute, other set-ups works as well but with different methods.

• OS X Snow Leopard (For speechsynthesis and OS)
• Ableton Live 8
• Chipsounds (For the C64 lead and Carrier on the Vocoder)
• MicroTonic (Drum synthesizer)
• Synplant (Pads and Bass)

In the Terminal application, write the following:

say “I am the robot”

This makes OS X’s synthesis to speak out loud, but if you add the following, it will write the audio to a file with the name you specify. (I used the file ending *.aac because it was the only format I got to work)

say -o “audiofile.aac” “I am the robot”

Now you can make short samples of synthesized speech that you can include in your music projects.

What I did after that was to import the speech into Audacity and convert it to AIFF format so that I could import it into Live 8. In Live 8 you have a function to stretch and beatmatch transients. So it doesn’t matter so much that the output from the OS X speech synthesis isn’t made for musicmaking.

A general tip about vocoders that I picked up from Kraftwerk, is that if you use an EQ on the voice (modulator) and add gain to the higher portion of the audio frequency range. You will get a much clearer sound.

Later a music radio station in London (I don’t remember which) had downloaded this demo song and had played it several times and emailed me if I had a longer version. That was when I decided to build the longer version that is released on micromusic.net

The first music video on this page was directed by E*Rock of Wyld File. www.wyldfile.org Who also directed a video for Beck. The second was made by me (Tobiah) as an introduction for the CD compilation “Boy Playground” which the track was released on.