Originally Posted by dcuny
Originally Posted by Janice & Bud
Not a user of this tech … but curious. Wouldn’t an fx like Waves Vocal Rider eliminate or reduce the amount of manual volume lane shaping?
Yeah, but Noel is going for the opposite effect. Instead of going for a uniform volume, he's bringing up the volume on verbs and nouns, and down on prepositions and conjunctions.

He could do this within SynthV as well. I just assume it's easier (and less CPU intensive) to ride the faders in his DAW.

I've found that once I started really listening hard to English, things like connecting words (prepositions, conjunctions) and most pronouns are softer than the words that contain the meaning or the additional information about meaning (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). This turns out to be useful information when aiming to increase the realism of the vocaloids.

  • Pat Pattison first drew my attention to the relative intensities of syllabic stresses because they are very important for aligning syllabic flow with the rhythmical flow of a melody. He covers this in his books if anyone wishes to know more about it.


Also, I think it pays to know about the two broad categories of spoken language. These are (1) Stress-timed and (2) Syllable-timed.

  • In stress-timed languages, the syllabic flow varies between long and short syllables due to the stressed and un-stressed syllables. In syllable-timed languages, the syllabic flow is pretty much constant and all syllables are held for similar lengths of time.


From an English perspective, what this means when working vocaloids is that the stressed syllables are most often better placed on longer notes than unstressed syllables. This information helps with getting the correct timing for the flow of language when it comes to working with vocaloids. Lastly, stressed syllables always work better when placed on a rhythmically stronger beat whereas unstressed syallables work best on the weak beats.

  • Stressed syllables are also usually slightly higher in pitch than the neighbouring unstressed syllables and this information is often useful when it comes to shaping a melody. It's not a requirement for melodies, though, that the stressed syllables need to be on melodically higher pitched notes.


To hear the difference between stress-timing and syllable-timing, the below two videos are the same song in English and Spanish. The Spanish clip also has conversational language at the start and it's easy to hear the flow of syllable-timing as the Spanish is spoken.

Unbreak My Heart (English)

Unbreak My Heart (Spanish, some conversational Spanish at the start)

MY SONGS...
Audiophile BIAB 2024