This utility generates a browser-based memorization aid for Mickle Maher's play, There Is a Happiness That Morning Is.
Click a colored block of text to hear it spoken aloud. Click it again to make it stop. Playback will automatically continue to the next block.
You can also use the SPACE bar to pause and restart playback, and the UP and DOWN arrow keys to jump back or forward through the play.
Customize each character's speech using the controls at the top of the page.
The blocks are color-coded by character (blue for Bernard, green for Ellen, and purple for Dean).
Each character's speech characteristics can be controlled independently:
- speed
- volume
- speech style
There are currently six speech styles to choose from:
- straight (full text read with punctuation)
- no-punctuation (full text with no pauses, like a speed-thru)
- last-word-only (the last word of each line, useful for rhyming verse)
- two-line-cues (just the last two lines of each stanza)
- one-line-cues (just the last line of each stanza)
- line-boundaries (full text at varying speed, emphasizing the last and first words of each line)
The script is copyrighted and is not included in the public repository. Thus, you unfortunately cannot see a demo of the result.
This utility uses Amazon Polly to generate the speech sound files and the Saxon-HE XSLT processor to:
- convert the script text file to XML,
- generate the speech text inputs for Amazon Polly,
- generate the scripts for invoking Polly, and
- generate the final HTML page.
The script started as a PDF file. I used an online utility to extract its text and then manually cleaned up the text file (especially by adding blank lines between "stanzas").
I plan to adapt this utility for additional scripts as I encounter them and eventually abstract from these a more generically reusable tool.