386 DX

Billing itself as a "cyberpunk-rock band," 386 DX was the creation of Moscow-based contemporary artist Alexei Shulgin. Using an outdated computer running Microsoft Windows 3.1 and an Intel 386 processor, Shulgin programmed elaborate MIDI covers of classic rock and pop tunes by bands like Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Sex Pistols, and Nirvana, sung by a text-to-speech program with a digital Russian accent. Stylistically, the results fall somewhere in between Bell Labs' early speech synthesis experiments and the Dictionaraoke phenomenon that achieved a degree of online popularity dur...