Ve have vays of making you talk, Mr. Piano

This is both awesome and downright creepy. In a polstergeist fashion.




What you hear in the following video is a "speaking piano" reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009. Of course we have seen vocoders come and go during the last half century, but in this version the piano "speaks" by pressing down the keys (that means a real piano sound) rather than some complicated electronic ju-ju/wizardy.

It's rather evident (for me at least, who am a geek) that the software created by Berno Polzer and Peter Ablinger simply deconstructs incoming audio into harmonic tones, and then proceeds to press the corresponding keys on the piano in order to mimic the original sound source. A vocoder works in a similar way, filtering a carrier wave (the synth sound) after a modulator (the human voice) - the difference is that a vocoder works with voltages or digital data instead of mechanic actions.

Anyways, we won't be satisfied until we see this wonderful technique applied on kittens.