concerning the type-to-speech (or text-to-speech) programs. I recently found out that the electronic voice used on some records (most notably by Air on their new album) is a standard straight out of the box preset on an Apple computer. If I remember correctly one of the other 'preset voices' is called Ralph. Can anyone confirm this?
MacinTalk dates back to 1983 and has come free with the Mac OS since at least System 7.5 (1994) - possibly earlier. It is still present in Mac OS X. It has been used extensively in music, perhaps most notably by Aphex Twin (1995), Marilyn Manson (1996), and Radiohead (1997). One might say that it is ubiquitous and clichéd by this point, particularly in techno. It's now marketed as a tool for the visually disabled, but as a kid, it was fun to type various obscene phrases into a word processor and have the machine recite them. Ralph has been one of the default voices since about the mid-90's. His "catchphrase" (every voice has them) is "The sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse." I would be shocked if Kraftwerk have not played with this system a little, although I'm certain they have access to far more sophisticated implementations of synthesized speech. -Eric