I've got an open source project using ruby to parse strings and send commands via TCP to pure data. Which started with some of my earliest non-pd coding. It's not currently set up to read text files, but it'd be a fairly simple mod, so you're welcome to learn ruby and submit a patch. 

PDF's are a much more complicated file format, I don't know how you'd go about extracting the text content from them to feed the text-to-music algorithm.

Anyway, you can get it from

https://github.com/ajfaraday/text-to-music

The sonification is based on some simple rules:

Letters are a semitone apart in alphabetical order
Numbers describe a diminished scale
Spaces provide a gap
(there are some specific percussion sounds)

It's actually quite a nice way of hearing the patterns in written language, you can hear rhymes, and repeating patterns and rhythms from the character length of words. It's set up to read twitter streams and RSS to get some real-time data on a subject of your choice, too. 

All I would ask is that you let me know how you find the project, and if you can think of another use for it. 

- Andrew


Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2012 18:59:57 -0400
From: dataferx@gmail.com
To: pd-list@iem.at
Subject: [PD] text to sound

Hi, i am developing a proyect where the main idea is transform text data to sound. Time ago i was experimenting with the concept of devices as files in linux where you can "read" diferent files, like pdf as sound redirecting files to standar output ( by example in bash you can do cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/audio to "hear" the sound of harddisc data)
Then i am looking for similar procedures using PD, anybody out there know about a way to transform by explame a pdf or plain text into sound output? i know its a very general question but any help will be apreciated

thanks
F


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