It’s not exactly the Baroque Vocoder we were hoping for, but an Austrian composer has hacked a mechanical piano to recite text — and recite text it does (even if you need subtitles and some prompting from the voice-over to understand what it’s saying). The video itself is a little skint on technical details — even if the “wow!” factor remains pretty consistent — but apparently composer Peter Ablinger took a recording of a child reading the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court and converted the frequency spectrum to MIDI, which he was then able to play back using the chordophone pictured above. The gang at Hack A Day seems to think that the actual conversion was done in the Pure Data software package, and who are we to argue? We’re just wondering how Black Moth Super Rainbow will ever fit this thing onto their tour van. See for yourself after the break.

[Via Hack A Day]