Ableton Forum

Can anyone point some tips on how I can import text, pdf files to convert them to audio sources?
thank u in advance

Adobe Acrobat Professional has a feature built in called Read Out Loud does text to speech but of course you will still need something to record it so you can save it as an audio file AND I'm not sure if the free Adobe Reader does this. It's probably just Acrobat Professional.

atom heart wrote:Can anyone point some tips on how I can import text, pdf files to convert them to audio sources?
thank u in advance

thanks for the reply!
What I actually mean is how to get the raw data and convrt it to something musical .No need of text to speech features.
Alva noto uses this method a lot so I am trying to understand his method.

here is an example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfAe2ed1krA

Oh, I see what you mean. That IS quite different than text to speech

you actually only need to change the extension to .wav or .aif

but it will create very short waveforms unless there is a lot of text

had some fun with doing that a few years back, novelty wore off though as they all mostly just sound like noise and there are easier ways to create that!

check out the KVR developer challenge..

There is a plugin (Harsh Digital Noise ?) that will convert images to oscillators and play them.
Not exactly the question.. but in the right direction.
http://www.kvraudio.com/developer_chall ... hp#dc09_54

Plays two images (very poorly) as oscillator waveforms. The brightness of each pixel, starting at the top left, sets the amplitude of each sample.
Load images (png, jpg, gif) by drag & drop. Also converts wav files (32-bit float, 65536 samples long) to images by drag & drop.

I too am interested in this idea

alex.the.forge wrote:you actually only need to change the extension to .wav or .aif

but it will create very short waveforms unless there is a lot of text

had some fun with doing that a few years back, novelty wore off though as they all mostly just sound like noise and there are easier ways to create that!

How is this actually achieved, or at least, what program were you using to load the files?
All the programs I've tried say the file's corrupt, which I would have expected. How can I load it without it having the proper file headers and etc?

arafel wrote:There is a plugin (Harsh Digital Noise ?) that will convert images to oscillators and play them.
Not exactly the question.. but in the right direction.
http://www.kvraudio.com/developer_chall ... hp#dc09_54

To my surprise this actually produces a fair deal of usable, atmospheric sound if you tweak the controls right

colonthree wrote:I too am interested in this idea

alex.the.forge wrote:you actually only need to change the extension to .wav or .aif

but it will create very short waveforms unless there is a lot of text

had some fun with doing that a few years back, novelty wore off though as they all mostly just sound like noise and there are easier ways to create that!

How is this actually achieved, or at least, what program were you using to load the files?
All the programs I've tried say the file's corrupt, which I would have expected. How can I load it without it having the proper file headers and etc?

arafel wrote:There is a plugin (Harsh Digital Noise ?) that will convert images to oscillators and play them.
Not exactly the question.. but in the right direction.
http://www.kvraudio.com/developer_chall ... hp#dc09_54

To my surprise this actually produces a fair deal of usable, atmospheric sound if you tweak the controls right

Ahh okay.... now you're testing my memory...... maybe there was more to it.... I guess as WAV and AIF files have headers, maybe that's why you're getting the message

I have a feeling it may have been wavelab I used

maybe I opened them as "raw" files.... I know I did it all in notepad on the PC though, so it must have been down to the audio editor, so I'd just keep trying them and use one that allows you to specify what format it is and select "raw"

It was a good 6 or 7 years ago, sorry I can't be of more help

Harsh digital noise is a nice plugin..
thanks for the replies

does anybody know how to get these type of sounds by another method?

there is also a program called "Voxstudio" http://www.xentec.be/ which we used to use in a studio I worked in to deal with Phone format files (like vox) - It's not impossible that I used that, it seemed to be very versatile with file formats and I think you could manually tell it the file type

I think the only demo restriction is file length, so you could give that a go

Ah I managed to open some random files in SoundForge as raw files. Raw has to be explicitly selected from the file type drop-down in the open file dialog (even if the filename ends ".raw")

According to a quick google search seems Audacity has an import raw function also. (Maybe most good sound editing apps do?)
It's just then a case of choosing how the raw data is to be interpreted i.e. sample rate, bit depth, number of channels, that kind of thing. And choosing a filetype that gives good results. I would imagine most types of compressed files would generally give something that approximates to white noise, though I haven't tested this thoroughly. Best files to choose are probably those with a particular structure -- to get the most varied results. Most interesting sound results I've had so far have been via importing gameboy rom images

Any other suggestions?

Some notes I made (SoundForge):

• The higher the bit the depth is set, the shorter the file will be.
  - It almost appears to be have the second half cut off when loading as 16-bit in stead of 8-bit, for example.
• The more channels set, the faster it will play through
  - And as loading random files generally has results in quite a lot of high pitches to begin with, I'd recommend to load as mono
• Selecting "Signed" for the format type seems to give results most likely to sit centered on -Inf dB
  - Which you may or may not want.

Playing around with loop playback and the rate control in SoundForge make it almost easy to find interesting areas to import into say sampler/simpler, for example.

All-in-all seems an interesting and weirdly inspiring method to get some new digital sounds to play around with, if you have the time.