MBROLA song: Solomon's Key

MBROLA song: Solomon's Key This series is a proof-of-concept experiment on using MBROLA as a vocaloid. How it is made: First, an emulator is run so that audio is produced. The emulator runs e.g. Solomon's Key on the NES, or a NSF dump thereof. The emulator will log the audio output into a "SND" file which only contains information about pitch & volume for each signal generator, 60 times per second. (iNES 5.0 is an example of such emulator, but I used something other.) Then a program is run that reads the SND file, and translates the signal generator parameters into notes that have a start-time, duration and pitch. Said notes are converted into a stream of phonemes, that are saved into a .pho file. Four such files are generated, one for each channel of the NES. I wrote this program in PHP. Then those .pho files are converted into .wav files by the MBROLA speech synthesizer. A maximum of four wav files, one for each simultaneous voice. Finally, the .wav files are mixed together with SoX to produce what you hear here. Naturally, it is much easier (less laborsome) to combine an existing stream of pitches with an algorithm that serializes random phonemes, than to type vocals that actually make sense and to time them correctly with a melody. Hence the semirandom "vocals" in these movies. No manual entry of musical notes / frequencies was involved at any point. All videos in this series: Solomon's Key: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZsfJ0oJsWE Super Mario Bros. 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoiPGtjdJUg Super Mario Bros. 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoawIHeBsjU Super Mario Bros.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3RI1_qJlvk Guardian Legend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMchZiF228w or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGbT6XBchLo Mega Man, Elecman theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0r8wyRNe0A Duck Tales, moon theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AHzNQMX6K8 Double Dragon 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWcPc427cTU