advice: program to generate sound from characters

Hello all :-) ,
Could someone please help me with a little bit of
advice.

I am planning to write a program which would take as input characters,
say a-z and would output a wav/mp3 file to represent them. e.g. input-
"myname" output-> an mp3 file where a tone will be played for say
0.5 sec to represent each character.

I have searched for packages and have come up with a lot of results. I
am a little overwhelmed by the complexity of some of the packages for
text to speech and the like. Could someone please suggest a simple
program/library which I could use to convert a letter to a tone and
get a wav/mp3 file as output.

I have seen festival, and some other text2speech packages, but I am
just wondering if there is something much simpler for my
requirements.

I plan to use the program as a command line utility to convert small
chunks of text to tones.

Thanks,
-A
.