r2d2-in-sed

Overview

A [gnu] sed script for imitating r2d2 the robot's "voice". The idea to write this strange and useless code has come to me after I saw Kevin Boone's r2d2-voice project (written in C).

It's not a true speech-synthesizer but it can generate a well-known whisles and random notes, as the droid from Star Wars do.

Usage

In theory it would be sufficient to run (on an oss-compatible *nix box):

cat example.script | ./r2d2.sed > /dev/dsp

But in practice, due to some cryptic issue, it cannot generate white noise smoothly, hence I suggest to use a workaround:

cat example.script | ./r2d2.sed | cat > /dev/dsp

(> /dev/dsp should be changed to an appropriate thing that works on your system.)

Supported commands (all numbers are in base 1) a sequence of which can be fed to the stdin:

seed <random_seed>;
glissando <direction> <initial_frequency> <final_frequency> <duration>;
tone <frequency> <duration>;
buzz <duration>;
silence <duration>;
noise <duration>;
random <lower_frequency> <upper_frequency> <duration>;

As usual, see r2d2.sed for implementation details.

References:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R2-D2