The Sound of Waves, part of CodexBoston2017.
I'm interested in how different authors sound. Why does Hemingway sound different from Faulkner? What makes them sound different? I wanted a tool to help me explore the rhythm of a text, so I built this app.
The title comes from one of my favorite books, Yushio Mishima's Sound of Waves, a book with beautiful rhythms.
An app that converts text-to-speech, and then renders the waveforms of the rendered speech.
It uses:
- http://www.masswerk.at/mespeak/ to convert text to speech audio.
- https://wavesurfer-js.org/ to render the audio as a waveform.
The relationship between written and spoken text is complex. When we read text, we see word boundaries and whitespace. But when we hear text, there are actually very few pauses in the sound.