Saturday, February 09, 2008

Controlling an SP0256-AL2 speech IC from Live using Arduino


Video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu-KR1b9jII

"The SP0256-AL2 "Narrator" chip has appeared in many arcade games in the 80's for speech synthesis purposes.

This video shows a hardware ("real") SP0256 IC sequencer from Ableton Live via internal MIDI routing and a serial connection over USB.

In the video, the left track is the SP0256-AL2 and the right track is a drum track that is playing back on a virtual sampler.

I didn't really try to make words or phrases. Instead, i have tried to use the chip in a more musical way.

I really like the sound quality and some of the address sounds heard from the chip. Nice and grainy. "

3 comments:

J. Arcadia said...

Hey man cool post:

a) Sounds awesome!

b) The Youtube URL needs fixing

c) Where did you pick the chip up from?

Sebastian Tomczak said...

a) cheers

b) done. thanks for the warning

c) speechchips.com, of course ;-) what a suitable-sounding site, huh?

Anonymous said...

How about a link for your Schematic? USB, hey now that's cool!

:)