Researchers are re-creating the voice of late singer Hitoshi Ueki.

In a few years, you could be listening to an album of new songs featuring a duet between Elvis and Kurt Cobain. No, the two never cut a record together, but engineers and computer programmers are getting closer to being able to “resurrect” any singer’s voice for use in synthesized songs.

Yamaha’s been developing voice synthesizers for years — think Mac’s text-to-speech meets AutoTune — under the brand name Vocaloid. But to build a Vocaloid “voice library,” a singer typically had to sing every possible syllable, one at a time, in ...

From Wired How-To Wiki

While there are plenty of reasons to like an e-reader, one of the big promises is the ability to borrow e-books from a library. For some folks, this concept is the Holy Grail of the whole e-book premise. Just think of it. Being able to borrow any book, any time you want; you wouldn't even have to physically trudge to the library to do so. No ratty dead tree books that are missing pages or — even worse — despoiled by some unidentified, but decidedly nasty splotches that a previous patron thoughtfully left behind. No bei...