These are expanded notes from a talk I gave at composition.codes on December 21, 2025. Slides here. Video here. SaySynth is a synthesizer I built on top of macOS’s text-to-speech framework — more popularly known as the say command. But to explain why I built it and why I think it matters, I want to take a detour through the history of speaking machines more broadly. A Typology of Speaking Machines There are roughly four kinds of speaking machines that have existed over time: Mechanical —...
