I was playing back a MIDI piece and wondered if anyone had ever
combined voice synthesis with MIDI? I know that you can get MIDI
"ah"s, but I was meaning voiced from the text like a text reader.
Purely idle wondering, no-one need to make any great effort and I don't
(currently) have a use case. It just seemed the next step in the
development of computer music.
On the cheap, i.e. free (gratis) as well as free (libre), with some amount of work, you can use Festival to make your computer sing badly. ;-)
I made an unlistenable phone voice mail greeting where I have two synthetic voices singing in harmony. Most cannot quite make out all of the words, but some of my blind friends who grew up with bad synthetic voices can manage. (The melody is clear.)
See: