Daisy Bell TTS (shoob2000_-_daisy.mod)

Posted by MrBlister on Sat 14th Jun 2025, rated 10 / 10.

For context, in 1961 the IBM 7094 computer became the first computer to sing, it was incredible for the time and lead the way for more creative uses in which computers could be used for many things music related. This is a remake of that moment, In my opinion, the original sounded a bit overly robotic and uneasy sounding, but this version is actually a lot nicer, like a V2 of the original.

What makes this incredible is that you have to use all consonants (or less depending on if needed, 21 total consonants) from the alphabet and place them in the correct manner so it sounds just like speech, this is practically the bare bones of text to speech with all things tone, expression and more stripped down, intended to work just like the original. Also, as most consonants are pulmonic, (which means that they use air pressure from the lungs to generate a sound), noise and other tricks work really well to emulate those sounds, and it's executed well here.

Plus, the cool part is that 30 phonemes are used here (combinations of consonants to create unique sounds, 40-50 are usually more than enough for a lot of things), this may have been intentional, maybe due to mod memory limits if Amiga compatible, but I'm pretty sure that the original song used around 40–50 phonemes, I might probably be wrong, so it's more limiting and tricky, given that we have a smaller bank of sounds to use, and it actually came out pretty well!

Overall this is done really well and is really accurate to the original in its own style, this is not just a creative module, but it's technical and educational too