As Richard pointed out, a larger phoneme set would make this program phenomenal for English speakers. But it's "good enough" right now, and BIAB user can start working with this program right away.

Having MusicXML export (of the vocal track only) would be ideal, and I'm hoping MusicXML export gets added to BiaB in the near future.

In lieu of that, if you haven't got a music notation program and don't want to download any software, Noteflight is a web-based program that will import MIDI and export MusicXML. So you could get a free account, upload the MIDI into Noteflight, add lyrics, and export MusicXML into Sinsy.

Most synthetic singer programs use a piano roll sort of interface. Because Sinsy generates good performance by default from the score means that it's less cumbersome than other programs. Plus, most of this software needs additional drivers for Japanese language support, even if you're using in English.

There are a number of reasons that this software has taken off in Japan - the limited phoneme set certainly helps. Vocaloid was initially the leading software for synthetic singing, but the free Utau program has started to surpass it. An interesting feature of Utau is that users are able to create their own voice banks instead of being locked down to using commercially released voices.

Instead of just recording single phonemes, voice banks consist of recordings of consonants and vowels (CV) - "sa", "so", "see", and so on. More sophisticated voice banks have more complex combinations - VCV and CVVC. So there are very smooth transitions between phonemes.

Unfortunately, creating equivalent voice banks for English is a much larger undertaking, because there are a lot more combinations. But it's clearly doable.

In any event, it plays nice with BiaB, creates musical results and is free. That's very cool.

Don, interested in using it for any songs?

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?