Audio disk containing "Fra Martino campanaro" sung by MUSA in 1978
Multichannel Speaking Automaton (MUSA) was an early prototype of Speech Synthesis machine started in 1975.
Description
It consisted of a stand-alone computer hardware and a specialized software that implemented a diphone-synthesis technology. It was one of the first real-time TTS systems. It was able to read Italian in intellegibile robotic voice and also to sing managing up to 8 synthesis channels in parallel thanks to Linear predictive coding technology.[1] In 1978 it was released, after the building of a working prototype,[2] a 45" rpm audio disk containing some trial content of such synthesis, including the song "Fra Martino Campanaro" in "a cappella" (multiple voices) style, attached to some commercial reviews.[3] The experiment was conducted by CSELT, Turin, Italy and was led by Giulio Modena.[4]
^Nebbia, Luciano; Lucchini, Paolo (April 1979). "Eight-channel digital speech synthesizer based on LPC techniques". ICASSP '79. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Vol. 4. pp. 884–886. doi:10.1109/ICASSP.1979.1170598.
^Cantoni, Virginio; Falciasecca, Gabriele; Pelosi, Giuseppe, eds. (2011). Storia delle telecomunicazioni (in Italian). Vol. 1. Firenze: Firenze University Press. ISBN9788864532431.
^Umberto Oddone (5 December 1978). "Ho sentito il calcolatore elettronico che sa cantare "Fra Martino campanaro"". La Stampa (in Italian). p. 15.
