| A hostage's mother hopes, and waits
The jungle around him is a chorus of hissing snakes, screeching birds and ominous howls. Gonsalves does not speak, and the cries of the wild give Rosano chills. She kisses her fingers and presses them against the computer screen to touch his face.
Based on news reports, conversations with a former hostage who escaped, and messages sent to relatives from those still in captivity, Rosano knows this much: Her son sleeps in a hammock or makeshift bed, covered by a mosquito net and a tarpaulin, chained at the neck to other prisoners, amid a haze of horseflies, ants, wasps and spiders. Gonsalves survives on rice, beans and yuca, and suffers from hepatitis. Rigged explosives and camouflaged rebels carrying AK-47s surround the hostages, who are often forced to march for days through brush and wade through raging rivers.
Schickele gets Bach to P.D.Q.
Except for a period in the 1990s when Schickele took a breather to focus on "Schickele Mix," his eclectic weekly radio show, he has toured with the merry P.D.Q. Bach act since the early 1970s, usually as a soloist with symphony orchestras. P.D.Q. Bach's works continue to surprise. We're told that he was influenced by his fellow 18th-century composers, but the composer also managed to anticipate Schubert with his "Trite Quintet," Tchaikovsky with his "1712 Overture," and minimalism with "Einstein on the Fritz," a work that sounds suspiciously like Philip Glass's "Einstein on the Beach." "I actually don't feel as big a gap between P.D.Q. Bach and Peter Schickele as a lot of other people do," he says. "I think of composing in rather theatrical terms. The funny piece has to have some kind of particular gag and in a serious piece there has to be some kind of memorable gesture.
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It won't be too often that I post shameless self-promoting articles on DailyTech as top-tier stories, but if it was ever going to happen today's the day. When DailyTech originally launched, it was always part of the site plan to include some form of audio-enabled content. At first we attempted to use human readers. This proved too costly and too slow to create content accurately. In 2006 we attempted the project a second time with AT&T's Text-to-Speech API. However, even at a mere 10 million page views per month, a moderate text-to-speech license ran in the five-figure range. Not exorbitant, but certainly a hefty investment for something our readers might not even like. Enter Odiogo. The premise is simple: Odiogo takes an extended news feed from the content provider, runs the content against its text-to-speech software, and then republishes it as an XML feed. This XML feed can be integrated into an RSS feed for a podcast, or directly into the article as a "play" button. Nobody will admit Odiogo is a replacement for human-read news -- yet. The software is far from perfect when it comes to subtle pauses, tech jargon and the odd acronym. But considering the difficult nuances of the English language, and the improvement of text-to-speech software in just the last two years, I'm pretty stoked about Odiogo and text-to-speech in the future.
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