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SAD003 – Ode to Tropical Skiing 1:32 1.8MB

This is a text-to-speech rendering of John Forbes‘ wonderful poem, Ode to Tropical Skiing, which I understand was John Watermann’s favourite poem. I made this as an intro to a performance at a lovely night called ‘Warm Words, Music and Dirigibles‘, as I knew that the [...]]]>

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SAD003 – Ode to Tropical Skiing 1:32 1.8MB

This is a text-to-speech rendering of John Forbes‘ wonderful poem, Ode to Tropical Skiing, which I understand was John Watermann’s favourite poem. I made this as an intro to a performance at a lovely night called ‘Warm Words, Music and Dirigibles‘, as I knew that the audience would be appreciative. That’s the only time I’ve used it, so I think it’s OK to include here.

To make it, I used a program called Vox Machina and one of the built-in Mac voices (‘Alex’) and did a lot of tweaking of punctuation to modify the rhythm and cadence. I’m not entirely happy with the result, though, so I’d love to get some suggestions of better speech synthesis tools.