Saturday, February 20, 2010

How does your paper sound?

A little know feature of the Acrobat Reader is that it can read out loud papers to you. I find it actually quite impressive how a free software can do that, but do not really see the use of it, apart from the fun factor. Or maybe when you need to read papers while driving. Anyway, the voice reading is rather monochordous, while English is a language that is much more sung, compared to other languages. Thus it sounds really boring.

I just came across a website that allows you to translate a web page into music. Code Organ is based on the letter appearing in the web page and selects the scale, instruments and drum loop. And it works with pdf files as well. Now you can read your paper with the "appropriate" music.

And here is how the Economic Logic blog sounds.

2 comments:

Kevin Denny said...

I stumbled on it by accident. I think it makes me sound like Stephen Hawking so pretty neat 'though after a while it gets irritating. I suspect that the real benefit of it is for blind people.

Agent Continuum said...

I would be curious to find out how useful this is for the blind, in practice.

The major issues I heard was that it couldn't do much about ligatures (fi, etc.) or math (e.g. \pi).