Hung Truong: The Blog!

Extremely Online: a Book Review and a Retrospective on My Blog!

I recently found out about a book called: “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet” by Taylor Lorenz. As someone who self identifies as extemely online, I needed to see what this book was about. It ended up catapulting me on a journey through my own blog and online history.

The Making of a Christmas Album: Hung For the Holidays

This year, I wanted to make something special to go along with my annual holiday cards. Much like a washed up singer, I decided to produce a new holiday album. And since 2023 has been the year of AI, I decided to revisit my voice cloning projects in the process.

Introducing The Talkboy Ultra! An AI Powered Voice Cloning Toy

Note: This blog post is based on a YouTube video I made, which you can watch in the embed, but it also has some stuff that’s not in the video, so read the stuff I wrote below!

So while I was learning about AI voice cloning technology to make myself sing better (and to make Kanye sing stupid songs), I got an idea into my head that I couldn’t let go of. I was reminicing about the original Talkboy Deluxe from the movie Home Alone 2 (and the subsequent commercial that played on kids tv for years after), and how it was supposed to change your voice but really it just kinda slowed it down. I realized that I could make the dream of the Talkboy come true, and do it with real life hardware.

So here’s the story of how I made the Talkboy Ultra, which it turns out is a pretty fun toy.

Voice Cloning For Fun and Profit

Note: This blog post is based on a YouTube video I made, which you can watch in the embed, but it also has some stuff that’s not in the video, so read the stuff I wrote below!

I was recently stuck on a really long, 6 hour flight. Luckily, I had an internet connection the whole time, and I was testing out some nifty AR Glasses, so I watched a lot of YouTube.

I remembered seeing a video about AI voice clone cover songs, where someone will take the voice of a known artist, and then make them sing a song by another artist (e.g. Kanye West singing “Call Me Maybe”), or they create a whole new original song for the artist (e.g. Drake singing an original called “Heart on My Sleeve”).

Since I was stuck on the plane, and I had the privacy to watch whatever I wanted without my seatmates judging me for binging on a bunch of AI cover songs, I just fell deep into the rabbit hole of listening to a bunch of Kanye covers.

The quality really varied. Some of the songs were unlistenable due to weird glitches in the voice. But some sounded pretty convincing. The good ones still didn’t really pass as real, but I think that with some post-processing and maybe an actual sound engineer on the case, they could be great.

I was on a plane to Hawaii, and while I also had some fun doing Hawaii stuff, I also spent some of the time learning about voice cloning and trying to train some voice models myself.

Making a Trombone Champ Controller From a Trombone!

Note: this blog post is more or less adapted from a script I used to make my YouTube video on this subject. So if you want to watch the video, I’ve embedded it here! Or if you like reading more, then go ahead and read my post below! (I can’t stand the recent trend of making content that’s video-only so I refuse to not make a blog post out of this video!)

I just got this new game called “Trombone Champ” which is like Guitar Hero but with a trombone. It’s honestly one of the most refreshing new games I’ve seen, not only because it’s fun and has a good sense of humor, but also because it sort of reinvigorates the music game genre. I love that part of the game is subtly recognizing that you can’t really sound good on a trombone, which is hilarious. I did find that the control scheme could be improved, since you’re expected to play with a mouse (and optionally keyboard keys). So I set out to turn my soprano trombone into a real video game controller for Trombone Champ!