[Idle-dev] Making Python Speech-Friendly Under IDLE

[Mats Wichmann]

 >> What a cool idea.  I'd never thought of that.  How well would it work
 >> for the non-musical or those who have never played an instrument?
 >
 >If it works at all, I doubt it would depend on musical talent.  Remember,
 >the *key* point is that you can recognize indents and dedents, which would
 >be changes in pitch up and down, respectively.
 >
 >If you have a speech synthesizer that can vary its pitch in response to
 >control commands of some kind, you could test the effect by coding samples
 >of Python by hand.  If you don't have such a synthesizer, that's an
 >obvious technical obstacle to implementing this idea :)

I've been told that most (untrained) humans have a very hard time
accurately varying/controlling pitch in speech.  I was told this
in the context of techniques for keeping an audience's attention:
breaking out of a monotone is clearly a good idea but it's far easier
for us to do that by varying the /pace/ than the /pitch/, which
apparently very few people can do reliably.