Story by Donna Bigler
Choral performances by high school students from high school schools will be featured at the 2017 Choral Festival that is being hosted by Washington Adventist University (WAU) from February 8-11. Students from seven academies in the Columbia Union Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church will participate in the festival. They will stay on campus, take master classes, rehearse and offer three concerts that will be open to the public.
The concerts will be held:
Story by Ron Mills
While most of their schools’ home economics programs include instruction in cooking, finances and sewing, very few, if any, teach true fashion (style, technique and usage of dress). Faced with the fashion challenges of today, our young people need a solution. For Takoma Academy, the solution would be spearheaded by one of their own—Toni Horne.
Story by Blue Mountain Academy Staff
Blue Mountain Academy has successfully continued to build on its efforts to strengthen a global program that allows American students to sit side by side with students from around the world, as they and staff members learn from educators in other countries.
Story by Heidi Whetmore
As Spencerville Adventist Academy (SAA) sophomore Autumn Uhrig watched a YouTube video one morning, something piqued her interest. Millions of people who can’t speak rely on text-to-speech devices to communicate. Most devices have the same vocal sound for all users, regardless of age or gender. Uhrig learned of VocaliD, which, according to their website, is “the human voicebank of the world.”
VocaliD records human voices, mixes them with sounds a non-speaking person can make and blends them to make a unique humanized voice in which the machine talks for them. Uhrig wanted to do her part in helping someone find their voice. She visited the website, recorded a couple of sentences and waited to see if there was anyone her age who needed assistance. Months later she received an email that a young girl, Tesa, was a good match for her voice. Uhrig now needed to record 3,488 sentences to get the job done.