The radio piece "Abenteuer (Adventure)" deals with a relatively new genre of computer games, the so-called "audio games". Initially conceived as games for visually impaired people and blind gamers, these games have also gained popularity outside the blind gamer community in recent years.
The audio games had their first boom when the first computer games ever appeared in the mid 1970s. These were purely text-based, as computers at that time could not display graphics. The first of these text games, which also gave the whole genre its name, was "Adventure" (also known as ADVENT or Colossal Cave Adventure), which was written by Will Crowther in 1976 and first published on the ARPANET, the military-academic precursor of the World Wide Web. Since all these early text-adventures had almost no graphical representation, they were relatively accessible for visually impaired gamers: only the texts had to be translated into spoken language by text-to-speech systems. This changed, of course, as computers became faster and the games used more and more graphical elements and video sequences. From then on, a lively underground scene of hackers and programmers began to emerge within the visual community, who began to program their own games or tried to modify and adapt existing video games. Most of these early adaptations were quite raw and improvised, but still quite charming. Recently, some small game manufacturers have started to take an interest in audio games again and are trying to find a market for their creations. Most games of this new generation sound really professional and are produced with a lot of attention to detail.
It's only a short way from the representation of unseen processes through speech and sound in audio games to the linguistic description of sounding phenomena through poetry.The baroque poet Georg Phillip Harsdörffer published his main work "Poetischer Trichter oder Die Teutsche Dicht- und Reimkunst/ ohne Behuf der Lateinischen Sprache/ in 1647 in VI Stunden Together with an appendix Von der Rechtschreibung / und Schriftschetscheide/ oder Distinktion". The passages selected for "Abenteuer" from the "Trichter" deal with the manifold onomatopoeic possibilities of describing sounds from nature and the animal world.
Another aspect of the piece is the history of computer-assisted speech synthesis. We hear some very raw and hard to understand computer generated speech examples from early community produced audio games, then some more recent examples. But the obvious highlight of this development is the new "Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Synthesis" system, which is based on artificial intelligence and produces extremely naturalistic results. It gets really interesting when you choose "artificial speakers" who don't speak the same language as the text you enter into the system. In "Abenteuer", a German text (... the advertising text of the Google system itself) is first synthesized with various Dutch voices, and then with Chinese, Korean and Japanese voices as a choir.
In the last part of the piece, the famous opening sequences of the first text adventure "Colossal Cave Adventure" are spoken by the same Google cloud voices, but this time with German speakers. Although the intelligibility of the language itself is extremely good, we are still confused here, because the communication with the text parsers used by the early text adventures is quite difficult: the vocabulary that the machine understands is very limited. The player has to use certain phrases, otherwise the parser can't make sense of them and answers in quite nonsensical ways.(Text: Udo Moll)
|
PLAY