[PATCH] Update protocols to support tone generation.

[Bart Bunting]

Hi,

The emacspeak speech server that I am working on will certainly use
tones.  The server provides a tone
function which is used by emacspeak.

A reason why tones are superior to sound icons for some uses is that for
example the duration of a tone can be used to indicate something.  An
example of this is indentation.  The duration of the tone denotes the
indentation level.

If we were to use sound icons for this we would need an icon for every
duration of tone that could possibly be used.  Although it is
conceivable that you could have a large amount of sound icons, why would
you if it was not necessary and if you encountered a case for which you
had no icon then things would break.   

The pitch of the tone can also be used to differentiate between
things.  Speakup uses this to indicate which line on the screen you are
currently at. 

As far as I know the abillity to play tones has traditionally been provided by 
many
hardware synths.  Given that there is currently a patch and someone
willing to do the work my take on this is that it is a worthwhile
feature and is not adding any large amount of bloat or complexity to
SD.  Also as it introduces no external dependencies this is a good
thing.

Just my 2c worth.

Cheers

Bart

On Sat, 23 Oct 2010 12:49:45 +0000, Andrei.Kholodnyi at gmail.com wrote:
> > However, it must be considered whether we actually need
> > tones in SSML (combining them with other text), or if SSIP
> > support only is enough for the use cases we have.
> 
> before saying whether we need them in SSML or SSIP,
> it would be good to answer the questions
> - why we need them
> - who will use them
> - how it will use them
> 
> At the moment I'm still missing use cases which prove this functionality is  
> really needed.
> could we provide sound icons together with SD which covers proposed "tone"  
> functionality?
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Bart Bunting

URSYS Pty. Ltd                                                             
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