Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

The other night I thought I heard The Talking Moose on Channel 3. The speech synthesis was so similar!

It was one of those alerts that tell us where the thunderstorm or tornado watches are and how long they will be in effect. The announcements are heralded by ear splitting claxon honks.

The Talking Moose (TTM) was the first animated critter with synchronized, synthesized speech on a computer platform. It was a marvel.

TTM’s habitat was the Macintosh. It first appeared in the late 1980s, and you needed System 6 or 7 or so to run the program.

Once TTM was loaded on your Mac and activated, it would speak every few minutes while the computer was on. Its remarks were cryptic, or petulant, or humorous, or mildly insulting.

If you had not met TTM, and were not expecting that inhuman speech pattern to be vocalized in your hearing space, one of its abrupt utterances would startle you. My good pal Duane was in my office one day, probably expounding  the wonders of Unix and of Acer computers, when TTM, sounding aggrieved, said, “We never go anywhere together anymore.”

Duane knew I had not spoken, but there was no one else there, so he did not know who had, or who was being addressed. But he continued with what he had been saying, until TTM gave out the next off-the-wall utterance, possibly, “Where did you get that outfit?”

Looking about, Duane finally spotted the animated moose head on my Hackintosh, up in the corner of the 10-inch screen. The ears perked and drooped, the eyes rolled dramatically, the lips seemed to be forming the words, even the antlers moved a little.

Realistic? I can’t say, not having observed an actual moose speaking English. But TTM seemed to have personality. Okay, moosonality. The voice was obviously synthesized, as is the vocalization of the script being read on Channel 3 in the weather alerts.

Now Steven Halls, creator of the original Talking Moose, has come up with a downloadable program for PCs. One of these days I’ll have to get it. The version I had on the Hackintosh could speak its various pre-programmed remarks at random, and the user could add others. It was possible to vary the intervals between utterances, or to trigger one with some keyboard activity.

That was my first Hackintosh. It was based on an Atari ST 1040, a wonderful little computer with a Motorola 6000 processor, the same one used in the initial Macs, but utilized much better. Mine had two 3.5-inch floppy drives, an external hard drive (10 megs, would you believe) and a cartridge port.

Plugging a special EEPROM into the cartridge port convinced the Atari that it was a Mac, and then it would run a System and Finder, and the smiling little Mac icon would appear. Unaided, the Atari ST had a better graphical user interface then the Mac, and TOS in ROM (the operating system in read-only memory).

At the time the Atari was doing serious work in my office, but to do some of the news stuff I was doing I had to interact with the newspaper’s Macs, thus the hack.

The Atari didn’t have enough signal strength from its Centronics parallel port to drive the giant C. Itoh near-laser-quality dot matrix (impact) printer, so I found a powered spooler to boost the output just enough, and that printer thought it was more than a match for the best Panasonic on the market.

As for the Hackintosh, it could team up with an Apple LaserWriter, but came to prefer the company of a Canon Personal Copier which had been fitted with a board that gave it PostScript and PCL smarts.

A more recent hack has been another Hackintosh, this one capable of running OSX Tiger, then Leopard, but never upgraded to Snow Leopard. I took it off line a while back because it doesn’t run anything I need to use that my Windows systems won’t handle at least as well. Now and then someone might need me to convert some material from Mac to PC, but that happens too seldom to be worth the space on my desks.

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“Every motorcycle must be constructed, equipped, maintained, and operated so that the vehicle does not exceed the sound level for the vehicle.

“Every motor vehicle must be equipped with a muffler or other effective noise suppressing system in good working order. No muffler or exhaust system can be equipped with a cutout, bypass, or similar device.

“A person must not modify the exhaust system of a motorcycle in a manner that will amplify or increase the noise emitted by the motor vehicle above the maximum levels permitted by Department regulations.”

Those are Pennsylvania regs governing motorcycle noise levels for on-highway use.

You could fool me.

The EPA standard decibel level for bike exhaust noise is 80 dB, or so I read. Manufacturers make sure that every bike leaves the factory with an EPA stamp on the chassis and on the exhaust system.

It’s hard for me to believe that the groups of bikes roaring through town are within lawful limits. Perhaps many of them have had the original exhaust systems swapped out so that now they have straight pipes (contrary to law).

Then there’s the multiplier effect of close formations of bikes, riding two abreast, in close order.

The noise pollution caused by groups of people out enjoying their hobby doesn’t build the image of the sport or its participants. It is inconsiderate in the extreme for the riders to go through residential areas close together in numbers that inevitably produce high noise levels.

I have had to stop teaching, interrupt phone and other conversations and give up recording on summer days, especially on weekends. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech technology I need to use, to do my work? Impossible, when the bikers are having their fun. Listening to Talking Books is difficult during the onslaughts.

Maybe one day a year we could accept this as some clubs’ way of honoring fallen heroes and our POW/MIAs. The rest of the time, in-your-face assaults on our hearing create a lousy impression of any group and a disservice to any noble cause. Bikers should slow down, quiet down and space out, in town.